


is it too late (or could this love protect me)

by Rizandace



Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Emotional Infidelity, I love Alice very deeply, M/M, Mutual Pining, No Magic AU, This is not an anti-Alice Quinn thing, and this is an example of how, but my god Quentin and Alice are Bad for each other, idiots hurting each other's feelings for a while but then finally ceasing to be quite so dumb, twenty-somethings trying to figure shit OUT AU, undergrad AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-25
Updated: 2020-09-03
Packaged: 2021-03-07 00:34:16
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 31,429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26097940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rizandace/pseuds/Rizandace
Summary: Quentin… can’t really interpret the look on Eliot’s face. He almost looks nauseated, like the news that Quentin and Alice’s relationship is over is somehow terrifying to him.“Are you okay?” he asks, and something about the way he says it almost makes Quentin start crying. This, of all things. There’s a desperation there, in the sheen of Eliot’s eyes, like the thought of Quentin not being okay is deeply, viscerally painful to Eliot somehow. As if Quentin’s ever really okay. As if he’s been okay at all recently. Ha ha. Imagine a world in which he’s okay. Poor Eliot, wanting the impossible for his friend. What a beautiful heart he has. Quentin should tell him that, maybe.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Comments: 344
Kudos: 362





	1. Chapter One

**Author's Note:**

> Hey so uhhhh. Three things.
> 
> 1) I am working very hard on a big, sprawling AU that I've told a lot of you about, and it's going really well but it's a project and I need some more time before I start posting, but at the same time...
> 
> 2) I am but a humble fic writer who craves validation on a semi-regular schedule, so... here's this thing that happened?
> 
> 3) It has been... a long while since I've posted something quite this free-form, quite this unplanned. I know what happens, but I don't have it all perfectly plotted out and drafted. There will probably be three chapters. I will probably post the next part soon-ish, but whether that means in three days or two weeks, I'm... not entirely sure? RIP me. I hope you enjoy whatever this nonsense is!

This is a story about nothing and everything. It is a story between then and now. It is a story of people living their lives, living them, and living them, and continuing to live them, with only some pedestrian heartbreak and alcoholism and good old millennial economic angst to add some variety to the humdrum of continued existence.

This is a story about stupidity, and love. Stupid love.

~~~~~

Quentin doesn’t make the trip to Eliot and Margo’s apartment often.

It’s not all that far, he could probably even walk it if he had a spare hour, but their lives are so different these days, and there never seems to be time. Eliot’s working various part-time gigs, catering and bike messengering and whatever else comes his way, with auditions filling up his spare hours. He goes to shows and parties with potential connections in the New York off-off-Broadway theatre scene… and meanwhile Quentin wakes up at five-thirty in the morning every single day and trudges to his office on the fifty-first floor of a boring grey high-rise, to a shared space with the other new kids at the firm. He works sixty hour weeks if he’s lucky, he reads small print until his eyes sting and he gets blue ink stains on his hands, and then he goes home and makes pasta for dinner and works some more at the kitchen table and then goes to sleep.

They’re worlds apart from each other, really. Q and Eliot. Hypothetically they’re best friends, but these days they usually don’t manage to see each other more than once every couple of months.

With a jolt, as Quentin stands in front of Eliot’s door, having slipped in after a neighbor instead of calling to be buzzed in, he realizes that the last time they saw each other in person was Eliot’s birthday, back in October.

He knocks on the door before he can second guess himself. Eliot answers almost instantly, and for a moment he stares, as if he can’t process the sight in front of him.

“Q,” he says. “What—hi? Hello.”

Quentin is probably bothering him. Quentin should have called. But god, it’s good to see him. “Hey, uh. Hi.”

Eliot’s expression morphs from genuine surprise, through to gratifying happiness, and then it takes a sharp turn into concern, likely at whatever he’s seeing on Quentin’s face when he studies it more closely. “Are you okay? What happened?” Eliot’s hand is on Quentin’s elbow, and he’s steering him to the match-box sized apartment without much further ado.

“I’m. Yeah, fine,” Quentin says. Which is stupid. He’s not _fine_ , obviously. He’d have to be an actual monster to be _fine_ at a time like this. But his brain isn’t quite working. For some reason he’s getting particularly stuck on the fact that he hasn’t seen Eliot in three months. That they’d texted each other _happy new years_ a few weeks back, and that was their only contact during the holidays. Was it the first new years’ eve they hadn’t spent together, since they met when they were eighteen? Jesus. Have they even talked since that brief exchange? January is almost over.

“Q,” Eliot says, loud and harsh enough that Quentin figures he must be repeating himself. “Sit down. Talk. You’re freaking me out.”

Quentin sits on the couch, and Eliot sits right next to him, angling his body close. It’s so comforting, his nearness, his smell, the warmth of his body. God, _three months_. They can’t go this long without seeing each other. Quentin can’t let it happen again. He’s missed him.

“Q, sweetheart,” Eliot says, very quietly. He has his arm wrapped around Quentin’s shoulder, his fingers a warm and reassuring weight. “Do you need to lie down? Do we need to call someone?”

His voice is sonorous and comforting and smooth as melted butter, but Quentin is aware enough to note a slight tremor of fear hiding at the edges of the words, and he realizes with a jolt that Eliot means it when he says that Quentin is freaking him out. That’s not fair. Quentin should say something. Quentin should _explain_.

“No, I’m okay,” he says, and he leans in to Eliot without even meaning to, resting his head on the curve of his shoulder. It’s how they are. It’s always been how they are. But it doesn’t mean—it’s just _them_ , it’s only… 

“What are you doing here?” Eliot says, and he manages to make it sound like a genuine question. Like Quentin’s presence is in no way annoying or disruptive. Eliot is a kind person, though. He might have plans. It’s late, isn’t it? It’s a Friday night, Quentin’s pretty sure. For all he knows, Eliot’s meeting someone. For all he knows, Eliot is _dating_ someone. It’s possible—they haven’t really talked lately. How would Quentin know?

“I—should have called,” is what Quentin says, which is stupid, and doesn’t help. He recognizes the beginning of a spiral, but recognizing it doesn’t actually stop it from continuing.

“Fuck that,” Eliot says at once. “You’re welcome here anytime. You know that.”

Of course Quentin knows that. He can always come to Eliot. Eliot’s always there, always waiting for him, always patient and always at least pretending to be happy to see him. Is that—is it true? Is Quentin really—are they—and he just never noticed? Fuck, is he really that much of a fuck-up?

“Q, please look at me,” Eliot says, painfully soft. “I’m right here.”

He is. He’s right there, holding Quentin, encouraging him, but also waiting, with infinite patience, and nobody else is like that with him. Everyone else _pushes_ , they pull what they need from him and leave a husk behind, and Quentin lets it happen, obviously. In truth, he’s grateful when people just take what they need because he’s always so bad at offering, he never remembers to—he doesn’t know how to care for people. Not like Eliot does. But Eliot never takes, Quentin never gives. How had he never _noticed_ that before?

Fuck. He ran straight here. He left home and he ran straight _here_. What does that even say about him?

“Alice and I broke up.”

The words come out disembodied, without Quentin’s conscious effort. The room is silent afterwards, quiet enough that Quentin can hear the rain pattering against the windows. It’s raining. Funny how he hadn’t noticed that. He’s cold, now he’s come to notice. His hair is wet, his clothes are wet, and yet Eliot is letting him sit on the couch that he and Margo bought together, digging deep to afford something nice, stylish, new. Quentin hadn’t gone with them, furniture shopping. He hadn’t been invited. God, that was five? Six? Years ago now. Two apartments ago. He’d been kind of upset at the time, that they’d gone shopping for their place without him. As if he should have had a say. As if his contribution could have added anything. Funny, the things you remember.

“What?” Eliot says finally, his voice quiet and disbelieving.

What?

Oh, right. Alice.

“We uh. We were talking about planning the wedding, and instead we just. Broke up. So, um. Yeah.”

“Slow down,” Eliot says, which is stupid, because Quentin’s not rambling, or talking fast, or crying or shaking or doing anything that needs to _slow down_ , and when he manages to look up at Eliot, he sees Eliot realize the nonsense of his own words as well. He blinks a few times, and his fingers tighten hard against Quentin’s arm and then drop away, hands coming to rest against his own thighs.

Quentin feels the cold, suddenly.

“I mean,” Eliot says, clearing his throat. “I mean, _what_? What happened. Start. Start from the beginning. How did this happen? What did…”

He trails off, but Quentin hears the rest of the sentence, not in Eliot’s voice, but in his own. _What did you do_? It’s a valid inquiry, he’s always been such a fuck-up, and if anyone knows that about him it’s Eliot. He’s nice about it, but he definitely _knows_.

But when he looks at Eliot, he doesn’t see any accusation on his face. Of course not. Really, Eliot’s _Quentin’s_ friend, not _Alice’s_ , El’s going to be on his side even if Quentin is the one in the wrong. That’s why he’d come here.

That’s… why he’d come here, right?

The thing is, Quentin… can’t really interpret the look on Eliot’s face. He almost looks nauseated, like the news that Quentin and Alice’s relationship is over is somehow terrifying to him.

“Are you okay?” he asks, and something about the way he says it almost makes Quentin start crying. This, of all things. There’s a desperation there, in the sheen of Eliot’s eyes, like the thought of Quentin not being okay is deeply, viscerally painful to Eliot somehow. As if Quentin’s ever really okay. As if he’s been okay at all recently. Ha ha. Imagine a world in which he’s _okay_. Poor Eliot, wanting the impossible for his friend. What a beautiful heart he has. Quentin should tell him that, maybe.

“I don’t know,” Quentin says, which is kind of the truth. “I think I’m a little numb? I don’t really remember how I got here.”

Eliot jumps to his feet suddenly, an oddly ungraceful movement for him, taking a few quick steps away from the couch. “Do you need to get drunk right now? Because we can—we can do that, we can get wasted and you can tell me everything and get it all out of your system, but Q, you’ll fix it with her, I know you will. You always do.”

“No,” Quentin says. No to all of it, no to getting drunk, and no to fixing it. No to getting anything out of his system. Why did he come here? He’s glad he’s here, but he shouldn’t be. He shouldn’t be. He blinks up at Eliot. “Do _you_ need a drink?”

A loaded question, and they both know it, and Eliot freezes, looking down at him, frowning in a very gentle sort of way. “I’m going to get you a glass of water,” he says, and turns to the kitchen.

The kitchen is really just the edge of the living room, hardly five paces away. It’s a one-bedroom apartment, and Eliot and Margo have done pretty damn well with it, honestly. The whole thing is meticulously clean and shiny and _styled_ , and Quentin wouldn’t be able to describe the style of it if someone paid him a million dollars, but it’s classy and the colors match and it doesn’t look like it’s inhabited by two starving artists who aren’t sure where their next paycheck’s coming from, it doesn’t look like a place where a couple of perpetually single semi-platonic utterly queer and slutty soulmates rest their heads at night in the _same bed_ because who wants to sleep on a fold-out couch, ew-no-thank-you, plus they don’t mind sharing, why _would_ they, and why are you giving me that face, Quentin? Margo had said, when Quentin had asked where they were both going to sleep.

“Uh. Where’s Margo?” Quentin asks, when Eliot comes back with a glass of tap water, cold but no ice, and hands it to Quentin.

“Not expecting her back tonight, I think she’s at a sex party,” Eliot says, with a twist of his lips that _could_ mean he’s messing with Quentin, or could mean he’s regretting his own absence at said event. Maybe he was about to head out and join her, when Quentin showed up and ruined his evening. Quentin looks at him, assessing his outfit. He looks good, of course. God, he always looks good, doesn’t he? But his hair isn’t freshly styled, he looks like he’s home for the evening.

Maybe he has someone coming over, and _that’s_ what Quentin is interrupting by his very presence here. If he were a better person, he’d offer to get out of Eliot’s way immediately. But apparently, tonight’s the night when he makes himself an inconvenience on everyone he loves, and he might as well lean into it at this point. Maybe he’ll give Julia a call later, wake her up in the middle of the night and force her to listen to him cry. Could be a good time.

“Q,” Eliot says, dreadfully soft and impossibly understanding. He sits back down on the couch, close to Quentin, close enough that Quentin can feel the heat of him. “Is this a thing where we sit here and talk about other bullshit so you don’t have to think about it? Or a thing where you tell me what happened so we can figure out what’s next?”

“It’s a thing where…” Quentin says, and then pauses so he can think of the real answer, taking a gulp of water as he does so. “It’s a thing where I tell you, and you don’t give me advice because there is no _what’s next_ , because my life has just actually blown up, and if I start crying you pretend I’m not, so I can preserve my imaginary dignity?”

He glances up at Eliot’s face, and sees his skin pull in tight around his mouth. “I don’t know how to watch you cry and not do anything about it,” he says, matter of fact. “But I can try, if that’s what you need from me.”

Eliot is legitimately the best person Quentin’s ever known, and he doesn’t get why some people don’t see that. Sure, he’s a fucking disaster and he can be cruel sometimes, but what most people don’t see is that the cruelty is always at its sharpest when it’s pointing inward, that if he lashes out he’s really aiming for himself. This, right here, is proof of that. Eliot would never allow himself the time and space to process and cry and grieve a big disappointment, and he’d probably sneer at anyone, Quentin included, who tried to tell him he was allowed to be sad. But when Quentin needed exactly that? Eliot wouldn’t dream of denying him.

“I—” Quentin says, and he takes a shuddering breath, shifting on the couch so their legs are pressed together, fortifying himself for what’s about to happen. Talking about this is going to suck, and Eliot is both the best and the worst person to be doing this with. “Okay. So. It came up naturally, to start, we were having dinner, and just like—Alice had read something about how young people today are less interested in having the full ceremony and reception thing, and there was some listicle thing about some fun creative romantic ideas for a more low-scale budget wedding, or whatever, and she was telling me about them.”

Eliot nods, his perfect curls framing his eyes. Quentin stares at him to stare at him, because he loves staring at Eliot, but he tries to keep focused, taking a large gulp of his tap water before continuing on. “And like—we have these conversations all the time, we’ve been having them for literal years, always talking about when we’ll get married—I mean, _you_ know how we are, Alice is so practical, and she’s on top of things, and she knows what she wants.”

It’s what makes her a good partner, Quentin thinks. She knows what she wants. Seems to know what Quentin wants better than he does, most of the time. He catches a weird expression on Eliot’s face, and plays back over what he’s just said. _You know how we are_.

Does he? Does Eliot know how Quentin and Alice operate together? He’s been around them as a couple, sure, but not that often. Not that much. Not since the early days, senior year at NYU when they’d first gotten together. Another thing Quentin had somehow failed to notice, because to notice it would be to wonder about it, and that would lead him… where? Here?

(It’s ridiculous. Alice is ridiculous and she’s wrong. She has to be wrong, at least this one time. Right?)

“Okay, so you were talking about listicle weddings,” Eliot says, a gentle prompt.

“Right, yeah. And we were talking about… who to invite, because we’re—we were keeping it small, and um. We got into a disagreement about something and then she said she couldn’t marry me.”

“That feels like some serious editorializing,” Eliot says. “You and Alice have been engaged for almost five years, Q, and suddenly she just—”

The reminder of the time always makes Quentin feel defensive. It doesn’t matter now, because his relationship is _over_ , but he still trips over himself to offer the same tepid excuses he’s been offering to his mother every time he talks to her on the phone— “law school’s expensive, and we wanted to wait until we were both settled in our jobs, and, like, marriage isn’t even all that important to either of us, it was just something we both wanted at some point, but like—”

“I know,” Eliot says, interrupts, because he knows when Quentin needs to be interrupted, and god, he’s being so incredibly _patient_... “Hey, I know. Since when do you feel like you have to justify your shit to me?” 

“It’s been a weird day,” Quentin croaks, which isn’t an answer at all.

“Yeah,” Eliot says, so gentle, so understanding. It’s unbearable. “Alice loves you, Quentin. I know you’ve been stressed out, it’s… it’s a busy time for both of you, trying to get settled in…”

“No,” Quentin says.

It’s funny, the way he keeps contradicting Eliot’s platitudes, when they’re the same platitudes he’s been feeding to himself and Alice for months now. Years? God, maybe years. He and Alice haven’t been happy, haven’t been _connecting_ lately, but they haven’t been fighting or miserable either, and… it’s a hard time in both of their lives. Both starting at different law firms, both working that crazy first-year associate life, reduced to seeing each other only briefly, like ships passing in the night. Neither of them have been taking any time to fucking nurture their relationship, or whatever his therapist used to say when he’d talk about Alice. _Relationships take effort_ , and lately he just hasn’t been fussed.

The truth of that is a punch to the gut. But Eliot’s wrong, just like Quentin’s been wrong all this time. He and Alice, they haven’t been going through a rough patch, working through a transitional period in their life together. There have been no choppy waters. Just smooth, flat, shallow sameness, and then tonight, a shot directly between the eyes. An execution.

He’s mixing his metaphors, and the room is too quiet.

“No,” he repeats, firm, staring down at his hands in his lap. They’re not shaking, because he’s squeezing them too tightly together. “Alice was the one who said it, and it shocked the fuck out of me, but she—she’s right, El. She’s always right. This was where this was always heading.”

“You’re upset,” Eliot says.

“No shit.”

“I mean… look, rant away, who the fuck am I to stop you, but don’t write it off just because you got into a fight. Seven _years_ —”

“I know how long it’s been,” Quentin snaps, and Eliot flinches, which makes Quentin feel like a very particular kind of monster. “Fuck. I know how long it’s been, but that… that just goes to show how fucking… how _insanely_ stupid I’ve been, you know?”

“No,” Eliot says. “No, I don’t know. You’re not stupid, Q. I hate it when you say that.”

Quentin stares at him. _Believes_ him, because it’s Eliot. The way Eliot looks at him, it would be impossible not to believe he’s worth something.

If Alice was right… if she’s _right_ …

God.

Only one way to find out.

“Alice broke up with me because I said I didn’t want to invite you to our wedding.”

The room goes silent, a particularly profound, heavy, intensive quiet that sweeps over the room in waves. Quentin wishes Margo would get home early, unexpectedly, swoop in and cut through the tension, wipe away whatever’s happening, whatever’s about to happen.

Eliot blinks at Quentin, his face doing several complicated, messy things, and then he settles on a light chuckle, the softness entirely gone, now. “Wow, Coldwater.”

Quentin swallows hard, and tries to backtrack. “Not that—I wouldn’t have wanted you to _be_ there, it’s just—”

“Clearly you didn’t,” Eliot says, looking down at his laced fingers, his mouth twitching all over the place.

“No! I—I didn’t want to invite you because I—it wasn’t you _specifically_ , it was just—didn’t seem like your kind of thing, and I didn’t think you’d—and I worried maybe you’d—”

“Ruin your wedding,” Eliot says, nodding broadly, an ugly sort of grin creeping up on his face.

“No,” Quentin says at once. “No, of course not.”

“No, I mean, I can hardly blame you,” Eliot says, airy and fake, and Quentin knows this voice, knows this demeanor, and it’s phony as _shit_ , the kind of crap he pulls on people he doesn’t know or doesn’t care about, not on Quentin. Never with Quentin. “I’m a specific kind of friend to have, I’m well aware of this. Suitable under limited circumstances.” He waves a hand in front of him, like he’s giving a presentation. “Good to have around in your early twenties, a _little_ more pathetic when you’re pushing the big three-oh, am I right?”

“What?” Quentin says, the word catching on his throat on the way out. “What the fuck are you talking—”

“I’ve gotta say, I’m surprised to have _Alice_ for my defender, she never seemed to like me much,” Eliot says. He stands up, pacing a short line along the landing, his eyes looking up at the ceiling, unseeing, cold. “Maybe she’s just worried her friends will talk if I’m not there. People will think she’s holding on to old grudges, Q, and she wouldn’t want _that_ to ruin her big day—”

“Eliot, stop. Just—shut up for a minute,” Quentin says. His mind is racing, and he feels something choking up in the back of his throat, something that feels like tears. God, he’s such a _fuck up_ , he never should have broached this insane topic in the first place, because clearly he was wrong, and Alice was wrong, and—

“Between the two evils, having people speculate about my absence, and actually _having_ me there… maybe she hoped I’d be on my best behavior. After all, we’re best _friends_ , aren’t we, Q? People would be bound to notice if I didn’t even warrant an invite.”

“Stop, shut _up_ ,” Quentin repeats, hand on his forehead.

“I don’t think I will, actually,” Eliot says, surprising him. Eliot is witty, acerbic, cutting, charismatic. He forges his own path, and does whatever the fuck he wants... but he never really says _no_ to Quentin. Not about anything. That’s something Alice had noticed, and something Quentin had taken for granted like the fucking pathetic piece of shit that he is. “How the fuck am I supposed to respond, here, Q?”

“I fucked up, saying that. It—it came out wrong,” Quentin says quickly. His legs feel numb. He wants to stand up, step closer to Eliot. Things are better when they’re—when they’re close, when they can touch.

“Oh, shocker, I’ll alert the presses,” Eliot says, surprisingly nasty. “Go ahead then, say it in a way that doesn’t fucking _suck_ , I dare you. You don’t want me at your wedding, and Alice is pissed about that? Why does it feel like these roles are reversed? Jesus, if _she_ wanted me to stay away, I’d get that, I’d—what the _fuck_ did I do, Quentin? Am I missing something, here?”

Eliot tugs a hand through his hair, turns to face Quentin, sitting there on the couch like a loser. He’s not meeting Quentin’s eyes, but staring at a spot just above his head, stone-face and unimpressed, waiting for Quentin to say the thing that will make this better.

Quentin knows he should explain. He has an explanation, actually. It’s just that this is about the worst possible way he can imagine, to broach the topic for real, to actually _say the thing out loud_ that he’s fantasized about addressing for, oh, the better part of an entire decade. The thing he’d pushed down so far inside of him that most of the time he’s convinced it’s not really there. Alice had tugged it out of the deepest parts of his chest cavity and thrown it into the air between them, insisting, _demanding_ , that Quentin confront it once and for all, and Quentin…

Had come here. He’d come here, hadn’t he.

“El. It’s not… you _are_ my best friend.”

Utterly pathetic, as far as explanations go. Eliot seems to think so too. He stares at Quentin in disbelief for a moment, and he’s not even trying to hide the hurt, it’s just sitting there on his face for Quentin to see, right alongside the anger. It _burns_. Quentin’s always been protective of Eliot, in his way, has always despised all of the people in El’s life who have hurt him, who have kicked him around and driven him to…

Well, to a lot of things. Despising himself is nothing new, though, so maybe Quentin shouldn’t be surprised at this turn of events.

“Great, well,” Eliot says, still staring past Quentin. His voice is blank, dull. “That’s… that sure is great, Q.” Then he shakes his head, letting out a sound that bears only the most tangential relationship to a laugh. “You show up here, you—you—you haven’t so much as sent me a text message in a month, Q, and then you show up to force me to be the shoulder to cry on when shit goes south with Alice? You _know_ that’s not fair to me. You _know_ it.”

“I didn’t!” Quentin says, grasping on to the defense before he can think it through. He’s almost relieved at the opening. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. That’s why I came here, I had to—I didn’t know. I didn’t realize—Alice had to _tell_ me, El.”

“Tell you what?” Eliot grits out, walking with purpose over to the honest-to-god drink cart he has set up against the diagonal wall by the kitchen, because of _course_ he does, he’s Eliot, and there’s always room for a drink cart, there’s always time for a cocktail, god, he’s utterly terrifying, Quentin’s afraid of him, afraid for him, _still_ , all this time, all these years, he’s the scariest thing in Quentin’s life, and—

“That you’re in love with me,” Quentin says.

Eliot freezes halfway to his destination. There are several long seconds of silence. Quentin expects Eliot to deny it, to throw a chuckle over his shoulder, to tell Quentin he’s gotten awfully full of himself, what with his fancy new job and expensive tailored suits. Instead, he speaks quietly, the words hissing out with deadly composure and gravity. “Get out.”

“El,” he says, the dread turning his skin ice cold.

“Go,” Eliot repeats, and it sounds a little less composed, but just as insistent, just as real, and Quentin—god, Quentin _goes_ , he stands up and he stumbles over to the door, and he searches clumsily for the door handle like he’s suddenly lost his vision, probably because— _ha_ —his eyes are all blurry with tears, suddenly, and he hadn’t cried when Alice had said _actually, no, our five year engagement, our seven year relationship, that’s over now_ , but he’s about to cry now, because he’s a monster who hurt _Eliot_ , and he came over here because Alice _said_ , and Quentin thinks, now, improbable as it had all seemed before he’d come over here, before he’d said the words out loud and Eliot had turned to stone, that Alice had been _right_.

He has the door open, he’s on the landing, when— “Q.”

He turns around so quickly he nearly trips over his own feet. He has no idea what he’s expecting—for Eliot to say _sorry, yeah, actually Alice is on to something, let’s run away together_? And he’s even _less_ sure of what he _wants_ Eliot to say, of what it would mean for him if Eliot—

But Eliot just blinks at him a few times, and then says, “are you—do you have money for, I mean, are you good to get home?”

Sometimes, Quentin’s brain breaks. And it does this in a lot of really weird ways, some of them intense and dangerous, others kind of _funny_ , in the right circumstances, but this time, his brain breaks by sending him the entirely wrong signals about the type of emotion that should be engendered by Eliot’s words. So instead of guilt, instead of the wobbly, inadequate apology he should be offering... instead, for some reason unbeknownst even— _especially_ —to himself, he stares his best friend in the eyes and says “fuck you, Eliot,” and then he slams the door shut and walks away, away, away, pretending he doesn’t notice the shuttered, shattered expression on Eliot’s face as he goes.


	2. Chapter Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, wow! Thank you so much for the feedback, I feel a little overwhelmed and very happy. Keep it coming, feed me praise, pls and thanks. ;)
> 
> I feel like this is an Unconventional Practice™ but I wanted to shout out two fics that are some of my favorites in the fandom, and that were big inspirations for this story in different ways. Neither of them are really… similar to this story in its final form, other than that they both involve Q and Eliot knowing each other in undergrad, and involve a period of absence and then reconciliation. But the other day when I was re-reading some of my favorite moments from several fics, these two in particular really sparked something in me, and that’s what set me on the path to writing this jumbled mess that you see before you.
> 
> So, if you’ve somehow missed OrchardsinSnow’s incredible work I Need You So Much Closer, and if you’re not already checking out peacefrog’s WIP time cast a spell on you (but you won’t forget me), please consider this author’s note a strong encouragement to read them both. And I hope the authors don’t mind the unsolicited shout-out.

On Quentin’s first day as a freshman philosophy major at NYU, he moves into the dorms, he meets his dickhead roommate Penny Adiyodi, he goes out to the common area, and he sees an intimidatingly gorgeous man lighting up a cigarette leaning against the doorjamb of the back entrance. Most of the parents and their progeny are carrying bags and boxes and pieces of furniture (which will definitely not fit in the match-box sized rooms) through the front door, so the lounging figure isn’t actually disrupting the flow of move-in day, he’s just standing in such a way that it seems like he wouldn’t care if he was.

It… should be obnoxious, but Quentin is sexually repressed plus incredibly nervous that he won’t make any friends here, so for some reason he grasps on to his first-day jitters and turns them into bravery, and he walks up to the figure to say hello.

And that’s the best decision he makes, maybe in his entire first year, or maybe in all of undergrad, or all of his life, because it means he meets Eliot Waugh, the most interesting person in the world.

Eliot always has somewhere to be, some strange activity to try. He and Margo Hanson, another theatre major like Eliot, are always coming up with weird ideas of places to go in the city, like checking out a local gemstone show or going to the shittiest open-mic nights, or venturing further afield, road tripping to see the lamest possible roadside attractions. Or else they’re just getting creatively drunk and high and finding fun people to talk to on campus, and for some reason, for some unfathomable, life-changing reason… Quentin gets to come along. They seem to actually _want_ him there.

Quentin has friends, the coveted _friend group_ that you make in undergrad, the people who live in the dorms with you and you wind up freakishly bonded because of how closely you’re all forced to live together, and literally before the first week is out, he’s not just Quentin Coldwater, jittery eighteen-year-old depressed virgin boy, he’s… _Q_ , and he’s got _friends_.

There’s Julia, of course. Hardly surprising that she’d refuse to let him go even now that they’re in college. If Quentin had perhaps entertained the fear that his childhood best friend would abandon him at the first opportunity, and allow herself to get swept up in the largesse of the campus instead of sticking close to his side… well, that was always his insecurity, not at all based in a real understanding of Julia Wicker. Julia’s in another dorm, and she’s made friends of her own—Kady Orloff-Diaz and Alice Quinn. The cool thing about El and Margo, though, is that they’re _Quentin’s friends first_ , and he gets to introduce them to Julia.

And then there’s the seven of them. Eliot, Margo, Quentin, Jules, Kady, Penny, Alice. Not always all together, sometimes they end up split between their separate dorms, but they eat meals together in the dining hall, and they get drunk together on Saturday nights, and they sit out under the trees on the campus lawn like a scene out of a college brochure, and make fun of the bros throwing a frisbee around nearby.

For the first time in his life, Quentin knows that happiness isn’t a thing that happens only to other people. For the first time in his life, whenever he’s depressed, he actually believes, in the moment, that it’s going to be temporary.

But Eliot is more than a conduit to community. He’s Quentin’s cornerstone, his lifeline, his _best friend_ , in a way that happens so immediately, so intensely, that he actually spends a couple of days feeling an odd sense of guilt, like this newfound closeness is a form of infidelity at Julia’s expense.

They become inseparable so quickly that Quentin pretty much forgets to regret the fleeting moment early on, when he’d thought maybe Eliot wanted to fuck him, and that maybe he’d be cool with that happening. It never had, for whatever nebulous reason, and he’s probably imagining the way El looks at him sometimes, speculative, hungry. Sex is sex, and it’ll happen at some point with someone. No sense in ruining a good thing...

***

Quentin’s not sure how he makes it back home. He walks, longer than he needs to, probably, before he remembers to take the subway the rest of the way. His misplaced anger at Eliot—for what, for kicking him out? For babying him by asking if he could manage the trip back? For being in _love with him_?—has faded entirely by the time he makes it back to his and Alice’s apartment, and all he feels inside is very cold, very numb, and like the only thing that might make him feel better is one of Eliot’s hugs.

Which is just. Well, it says something, is all.

Alice isn’t home. She’s left a note for him on the counter, in her precise, pretty handwriting— _I’m going to stay with Kady for a while, we should both cool off and then we can talk._

Quentin doesn’t know what it means, precisely. ‘Cool off’ could mean that Alice views what happened tonight as a fight, a point of conflict in their relationship which might be survivable for them moving forward. That doesn’t match with what she’d said, though. She’d seemed pretty definitive about it— _I can’t marry you, Quentin_ had been her words.

And whatever Alice had meant that fight to be, whatever she might be thinking right now… it doesn’t matter.

Well, fuck, it _does_ matter, of course, in the sense that Quentin cares about her and hates the thought of having hurt her, of having _been_ hurting her in a slow, poisonous way for literally the entire length of their relationship, because somewhere in the back of his mind a part of him always knew that—

Quentin sits down on the couch. It hadn’t been raining anymore on his way back home, but the jacket he’s wearing is still wet from earlier. Too thin, not waterproof. Not the kind of thing to be wearing in a New York winter. Maybe the numbness isn’t entirely emotional. Maybe he should take a warm shower.

But moving seems like a lot of effort, and he’s all out of that at the moment. He should be thinking about Alice some more, but he can’t stop picturing the look on Eliot’s face, the way all of his concern and affection had slid away, leaving that frightening blank, when Quentin had said—when he’d tried to start a conversation about the possible secret but not-so-secret feelings existing between them, and had done so by insulting Eliot and maybe kind of breaking his heart a little bit in the process.

He’s never been good at any of this, to the surprise of exactly nobody.

The point is, whatever Alice is thinking about their future together, it doesn’t matter in the larger, life-altering, relationship-obliterating sense.

Because Quentin’s _awake_ now. Whatever fog he’s been inside, however intense his denial, Alice has shaken him loose from the quagmire. He can’t marry Alice Quinn, because apparently Eliot Waugh is in love with him.

By all rights, the _real_ revelation should have been the other way around.

_I’m in love with Eliot_.

But when Quentin thinks those words, when he tests them, saying them out loud to his empty apartment like a weirdo, they don’t surprise him at all. Loving Eliot had been a fact of life, existing in the periphery of his vision for so long that he barely even notices it anymore. He’d never consciously addressed it, even to himself, but it wasn’t out of denial or repression or…

Well. Maybe it’s always been a little of both. But it was always sort of like, _well, if I lived in a parallel universe where Eliot thought of me that way, of course I’d be with him_. But that wasn’t the universe he lived in, and so he’d ignored it, and he’d had Eliot’s friendship, his loyalty, his affection, the warmth and trust and everything good, everything he’d ever wanted. There’s never been any room for doubt, with El. Never anything to worry about, at least as far as their relationship was concerned.

That had been the novelty.

The novelty is fucking _gone_ , and in its place, the numbness is fading away, leaving pins and needles over every ounce of Quenitn’s newly exposed heart. He feels flayed open, hope and dread ping-ponging around in his stomach, because if Eliot loves him, if Eliot _loves him_ , then he’s been in the alternate universe all along. He lives there, in this magical land that shouldn’t exist, that should be _impossible_ , and what did he do when he realized the truth?

Set fire to it, of fucking course.

His girlfriend (his fiancée) is sleeping on a friend’s couch tonight. The only serious, adult relationship he’s ever been in is coming to an end. And the thing he regrets more than anything right now is that he’d said something stupid enough that Eliot had kicked him out, that he’s not over there right now confessing a decades’ worth of repressed feeling to the man he respects and admires more than any other in the world.

(That morning, Julia had sent him a text saying that they should grab lunch over the weekend, and Quentin had sort of dreaded it because he felt like he didn’t have any life updates to give her. More of the same. Busy with work. Stressed. Still taking his meds, yes, thanks mom.

He laughs out loud. Well, he’ll have plenty to tell her _now_ , if he doesn’t end up deciding to cancel on her entirely.)

Part of the trouble is that Quentin’s brain is constantly a scramble, and the only way he knows how to figure out his feelings is to untangle the shit going on inside of his mind, and that means talking it through with another human being. But he can’t talk about this with Julia right now. He can’t talk about it with _anyone_ , especially not Eliot (if Eliot even ever wants to talk to him again, _god_ ), because until he knows how he feels, he might end up saying more stupid and hurtful shit.

He plays back over his conversation with Alice, trying to figure out how he’d gone from being bored-and-stressed this morning about working on a stupid merger, to being stressed-and-not-at-all-bored over the state of his love life, something he’d thought he’d never have to be worried about again.

It had started with Alice, casual and nearly uncaring, throwing out some suggestions for some fun low-key wedding ideas. She hadn’t been pushy about it, she never was, constantly repeating the credo that they’d get married when it was convenient, that they’d find a time eventually. No rush. No rush on marriage, on kids, on anything. They had time.

And then they’d reaffirmed the few things they both did care about, like keeping the ceremony really small, and Alice had started listing off people, and when she’d gotten to Margo and Eliot, Quentin had apparently made some sort of _face_ , and Alice had pressed him on it, because she’s always been way too observant for her own good, and it turns out that this one time, her observation in and of itself threw a grenade into their relationship from which there’s no coming back…

_“Why the face?” she asks, picking at her rice with her fork. “Did I forget someone?”_

_Quentin has no idea what compels him to say it, it just comes out like it’s a thought he’s already had. “Maybe not El and Margo, they’re not really… wedding people?”_

_What he means, and what he_ knows _he means, is that Eliot and Margo are his cool friends, his separate-from-real-life friends, the ones he loves but can’t imagine mingling with his parents. The thought makes him feel really shitty, but only as he’s saying it does he realize that he actually feels pretty strongly about the fact that he doesn’t want Eliot there._

_Huh._

_“Seriously?” Alice says, and she sets her fork down. “I figured Eliot would be your best man.”_

_Quentin laughs. “Oh, I’d pay to be in the room when you tell Julia that.”_

_Alice smiles, but it’s a feeble thing, concern puckering her forehead. “You love them, Q. They should be at your wedding.”_

_At this point, Quentin should shrug it off and steer the conversation away. They haven’t set a date, they’re not making a real invite list, there’s still time to put off any real decisions until a later, nebulous, maybe-it’ll-never-actually-happen future._

_But apparently he’s lost his mind, so instead he says_ —

_“I just think Eliot being there would be kind of weird. A bad idea.”_

_He’s dropped Margo from the equation, for some reason. The first sign of relationship-ending danger, and Alice sniffs it out like a bloodhound._

_“Why?”_

_“Just_ — _” he waves a hand in the air, trying for casual. “You know. He’s Eliot.”_

_“Are you saying this for my benefit?” Alice asks. She’s giving Quentin the weirdest look, one that’s knowing and discerning and the tiniest bit disdainful. “Because it’s not necessary, Q. It’d be way weirder if he wasn’t there. I like Eliot, you know I do. And I know nothing ever really happened between you two.”_

_...That hurts._

_It shouldn’t, but it does. It hurts, it_ rankles _, to hear it like that._ Nothing ever really happened _. To reduce his relationship with Eliot to literally nothing, to take the years of intense friendship, of_ devotion _, even, and describe it, quite accurately, as nothing at all. Not the sort of thing that Alice would even deign to be worried about._

_Because nothing ever happened._

_There was the one night, in undergrad, the infamous.... but they didn’t even_ — _and Alice knows about it, and it was so long ago. And it doesn’t count, apparently. Because why would it?_

_People do stuff when they’re drunk. Whatever. It had been a big deal at the time, to Quentin anyway, but it doesn’t matter now, and Alice is being kind by saying so._

_She’s being kind, and Quentin should remember that._

_The thing about Eliot isn’t that_ something happened _or that something_ might _happen. It’s never that. It’s that being with Eliot_ is _something happening. Something happens between them whenever they’re in a room together, or whenever they talk on the phone or text or email or snapchat or whatever. It’s happening in the air all around. It’s happening low in Quentin’s gut, tight in his chest, buzzing in his head._

_Eliot is an ongoing, ever-evolving, event. Eliot is the most intense, dynamic, bright part of Quentin’s life, and if Eliot is at his wedding, he’s not going to be able to ignore that singular fact, not even for Alice._

_That makes him a piece of shit, he knows that. He does. But in a bigger sense, he loves Alice. He wants to marry her. He thinks they work well together, that they’ll be happy and they’ll support each other and they’ll make good, stable parents._

_He doesn’t think those things about Eliot. Eliot doesn’t exist in the same universe of those things. He’s all-consuming, utterly eclipsing, and Quentin can’t really stomach the idea of him being there, watching, looking at him, while he announces to friends and family that Alice Quinn is the person he’s chosen to give himself to, that Alice is the partner of his life._

_Abruptly, Quentin realizes that he hasn’t answered Alice’s question. And that Alice is still looking at him. And that in addition to discernment and condescension, a building wave of anger is growing in Alice’s eyes. “Okay. I can’t,” she says._

_“We’ll talk about it later,” Quentin says, automatically. They’re always tabling conversations like this. What’s the rush? They’re engaged, they’re going to be married. Why talk about it if it’s going to make them fight? They don’t like fighting, Alice and Quentin. It’s too draining. They usually don’t bother, they just… shove it aside. Quentin had always thought that made them mature, but maybe it just made them cowards._

_“No,” Alice says. She seems to be in a distinctly un-cowardly mood this evening. “I can’t marry you, Quentin.”_

_Quentin looks at her. Blinks. “Alice.”_

_“You don’t want Eliot at our wedding. Why?”_

_“I just_ — _we talked about keeping it small,” Quentin says, which is such a pathetic excuse, but whatever. If Quentin wants to keep it small, the only people he needs to invite are his father, his mom and Molly, Julia, Eliot, Margo. End of list. Alice is the one with work friends. Alice is the one whose parents will want her to invite every distant relative and family acquaintance. He can afford Eliot on his invite list, and they both know it._

_But Alice doesn’t challenge him directly on that argument, surprisingly. She stares, she smiles, a little sadly, like she’s made a choice to be reasonable about this, instead of angry. “We’ve been putting it off for too long, Q. I think we both know we’re together out of habit at this point. Why put ourselves through this?”_

_“What the fuck?” Quentin says. “That’s_ — _that is_ not _how I feel. Is that how you feel? We’ve procrastinated on the wedding, I know that, but we live together, we_ — _”_

_“We procrastinated on moving in, too. And now we’re both working so much we hardly ever spend time_ — _”_

_“Alice, how is this the conversation we’re having? We’re supposed to be planning our_ — _we were just_ — _and now, what, you want to break up?”_

_“Yeah, we’re supposed to be planning our wedding. And you don’t want Eliot, your best friend, to be there.”_

_“I was just_ — _I_ — _it would be weird, I don’t know, weddings aren’t really his thing, I guess_ — _”_

_And then..._

_“He’s in love with you, you know,” Alice says, cold and unforgiving, flipping another switch, and introducing electricity directly into Quentin’s veins. “I sort of thought you knew that, but now I’m thinking I was wrong. We all used to talk about it, back in the day. Everyone else definitely knows.”_

_And Quentin laughs in her face, disbelieving, his entire body already desperate for more information. He imagines asking his fiancée for further details, like:_ really? He likes me? Does he like-like me, though? Oh gosh, tell me everything, Alice, _and the thought of his own absurdity, his own hypocrisy, makes him laugh louder._

_Laughing had been a mistake._

_The fight begins in earnest after that, and it goes on for a long while, and it doesn’t end until Alice accuses Quentin of being delusional, and Quentin storms out of the house without even grabbing a proper jacket to keep out the rain._

Alone, in the apartment that he and Alice had both chosen, the compromise-place, the place they’d both thought was completely okay, big enough for a home office and small enough to afford while still trying to unbury themselves from law school debt, Quentin takes out his phone, and texts Eliot.

_I’m so fucking sorry, El._

He waits three whole minutes, which is impressive, in his own opinion, and then adds on: _I want to talk to you. I want to apologize in person. I need to see you._

Staring at this second text while he waits for the little typing bubbles to appear, his eyes catch onto the last conversation between the two of them, started at 12:02AM on January 1st.

.....

_Happy new yyear, El, holy shivt its 2020 we all have goo vision now_

_goo vision?_

_gooD vision, bc 2020 ya know?_

_Drink water, lightweight._

_You don’t even know how much i’ve had to drink, though_

_No proof of intoxication wHat soever, maybe i’m just bad at typing_

_YOU don’t know_

_Check and mate_

_...you make a very good point._

.....

Quentin evidently hadn’t responded after that, because the next text comes in nearly ten minutes later, from Eliot again.

.....

_Hey_

_Happy new year, Coldwater._

_Virtual kisses from me and Margo both._

_Miss you, lets get lunch_

_Say when_

.....

Quentin stares at the next line, at the text he’d just sent, at 9:47PM on January 28, 2020, as if by staring at it he can make another message appear in between, an answer to Eliot, proof that he hadn’t left him hanging, that he hadn’t pulled a “we should get lunch sometime” on his best friend in the whole fucking world.

Then he throws his phone down on the coffee table, hunches over, and cries so hard he gives himself a stomach ache.

Eliot doesn’t text back.

Which is only fair.

***

When people used to tell Quentin that high school would be the best years of his life, it… hadn’t gone well. Not for the people saying it, of course, but for _Quentin_ , because those years of his life had been so tragically terrible that a lot of the time even now he stares himself in the mirror and finds it kind of miraculous he actually managed to survive them. He’d hear those words, and even though Julia always told him it was bullshit (and his therapist told him it was bullshit, and his dad, even, told him it was bullshit), he’d internalize them, and think, if this is supposed to be the _best_ , what the fuck is coming for me next? Maybe it’d be better…

But he didn’t, he survived, and he made it to eighteen alongside Julia, he made it to NYU, to Margo and Alice and Penny and Kady and—Eliot.

His years going to school in New York, getting an undergraduate degree in philosophy (with a business minor because hey, when you don’t know what you want to do with your life, you… lay the groundwork for a career in law, apparently), are far and away better than anything Quentin could have pictured for himself.

They go by so fast, and they also feel like this is how things have literally always been: long nights of studying, or drinking, or getting high, or sometimes a strange mish-mash of all three. The Slutty Period in the first semester of sophomore year, as Julia loves to call it, where he manages not only to finally have sex for the first time, but to hook up with fully _four different people_ , three women and one _man_ , and discovers that while literally everything in the world makes him anxious to some degree, sex is actually super fun and as long as the person you’re doing it with is like—cool, and patient, and knows how to talk about stuff, it’s not actually something to freak out over.

And then, Alice.

He and Alice are friends from the start, but she’s closer with Kady and Jules and Penny, while Q spends more of his time with Margo and Eliot, two groups closely linked by Quentin and Julia’s pre-existing friendship. It’s not until the summer before senior year that he and Alice start spending any real time together.

He’s had one and a half “relationships” in his life up to this point; the first had been an ill-advised high school girlfriend (ill-advised because Quentin had been a mess and hadn’t been honest about that, and Sara had been sixteen and doing her damn best, but she couldn’t possibly have saved him, not the way he’d thought love was supposed to save you), and the second had been Poppy, a senior when Q was a sophomore, who—well, they’d never been exclusive? Maybe? They certainly hadn’t talked about it, and they’d hung out a lot and then Poppy had been over it and Q had cried about it to El just a little bit but really he’d felt mostly _fine_ , which had been kind of weird, and then—

And then Alice. They have a lot of conversations, about their lives, about who they are, about what they might be able to build together. It feels different from any other relationship (platonic or otherwise) that Quentin has ever built—intentional, precise. It makes him feel like an adult, as he turns twenty-one and takes Alice Quinn out on a nice date, orders a glass of wine with dinner…

Then Alice goes on a trip for the last month of summer before the start of their senior year, and they’d talked beforehand, talked about how they weren’t a couple yet but that was where they were headed, and so it hadn’t felt like cheating, precisely, when…

And why that night? What had happened? Q remembers _talking_ to El about Alice, about how excited he was about her, about how he’d never had the chance to miss someone in a relationship before, and how her being gone for a few weeks might actually be a really good thing, might help him understand better precisely how he feels, how he’ll be walking into something head-first, with his thoughts clear and settled for _once_ —and god, also, he’d kind of missed hanging out with El, that summer had been sort of weird, Q had been spending a lot of time in Jersey with his dad, with Jules, and then forming this new thing with Alice, and sure, El was always around, they _lived_ together now, in that shitty old house with five bedrooms, with Margo and Kady and Penny, but somehow still it was like they hadn’t spent much time together one-on-one.

And so they’d gotten so fucking high, and they’d spent all day inside even though it was sunny out, and Eliot’s always extra snuggly when he’s high, and so they’d wound up cuddled up together on the couch as the afternoon morphed into evening and into some sort of chill, low-energy party with their other roommates and some other random people who had wandered in from who-knows-where, and then they’d had drinks, a lot of drinks, and El had been glued to his side all evening, and Quentin had more or less forgotten the existence of Alice Quinn entirely, and when Eliot had kissed him it had felt like the most natural, simple thing in the universe.

Quentin is supposed to regret that night because of all the shit that came after—the fact that Eliot had been weird with him for a while afterwards, had insisted that it wasn’t a big deal but then hadn’t touched him in weeks, and of course Q had had to tell Alice when she got home that he’d not only slept with someone, but slept with _Eliot_ , his best friend and a person he _lived with_ , and that had involved a lot of conversations, a lot of discussion, and while he and Alice had still decided to try to date, and while it had all worked out for the best, there was definitely something _tainted_ about the start of everything now, wasn’t there?

He’s supposed to regret it because of all of those things, but really, he only regrets that he’d been too drunk to do it properly. They’d just made out on the couch, and then they’d been in El’s room, and he doesn’t remember the details, doesn’t remember, really, what Eliot tasted like or if he’d been a good kisser or what he’d said, or what Eliot had said… (he gets only flashes, when he’s least expecting them, and he _does_ remember... _god, god, oh god, Q, sweetheart_ , murmured into the skin of his neck and Eliot moved his hand over both of them, fast, frantic, the fingers of his free hand biting into his waist, tugging him in so close… but the _sweetheart_ thing has got to be something his sabotaging brain made up to torment him, right?)

He doesn’t have to remember it to know that it had been good, that it had been fantastic, even sloppy drunk and ill-advised and _incomplete_ , even though all it had been was gasping, clacking, uncoordinated kisses, hands shoving down pants, bodies writhing together with a frantic energy, like they’d both known, somehow they’d both _known_ they needed to do this fast, _nownownow_ or the moment would pass and they’d never _feel_ each other again…

And seven years later, Quentin spends the night alone in his bed with his phone sitting on the pillow next to him, waiting for it to ring. Waiting for it to chirp with a new message. For a while, he tries to pretend the ache in the center of his chest, the desperate loneliness, is a call for Alice. He tries to convince himself that something that’s lasted as long as this relationship can’t possibly be wrong, or bad, because they didn’t fight, they’ve always agreed on all of the important stuff, really, so maybe…

But he’s not aching for Alice, he’s aching for _Eliot_ , as if he has any right to do that, as if he even has any idea of what he’s aching _for_ , just that one stupid night, just two kids, just Eliot… Eliot maybe reaching out to have him, to do something he’d been wanting to do, to take a chance before it was gone forever.

But _goddamn_ him, if Eliot had _said_ something, Quentin would have…

The phone remains stubbornly silent.

Quentin stays awake all night watching it, just in case.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay this is so random and the thing only my brain cares about probably, but the first chapter of this fic was 4,862 words and this chapter is 4,861 words? So apparently I’m consistent? Weird.
> 
> Thanks again everyone! (And yes, I did change the chapter count oops).


	3. Chapter Three

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, this is now marked as five chapters, and I'm sticking to it this time! I'm 97% percent sure! I'm 84% sure! I'm... not used to writing in this way, with so little planning!!
> 
> Thank you again, so much, for all of the kind feedback! It's been making me so happy over the last couple of days.

Julia doesn’t react the way Quentin had expected her to.

His opening gambit is to change their Saturday plans to take-out instead of a restaurant, and he trudges over to her place, presents her with pad thai, and flops down onto the floor by the coffee table. Julia… well, she doesn’t immediately demand an explanation for the circles under his eyes and the unkept greasiness of his hair, which Quentin considers a huge sign of restraint on her part, so he decides to reward her by telling her more or less everything.

He doesn’t even cry while he says it—probably too worn out from the night before. Nobody’s texted him, or called him, other than one of the partners at the firm telling him to come in tomorrow (on a fucking Sunday) to help with a diligence thing that he definitely doesn’t want to do. No word from Alice, and definitely no word from Eliot. He’d sent just one more message that morning— _I’m begging you to please let me talk to you. I’m here whenever you’re ready_ —but no response.

And Julia? Julia sits stone still, processing ‘Alice and I broke up’ and ‘Eliot’s in love with me-slash-probably hates me right now’, and when Quentin’s done talking, she just looks at him, blinks three times, and then buries her face in her hands.

“ _Fuck_ , Quentin. _Still_?”

“Still what?” he says.

“I thought you got over him forever ago.”

This is so far from anything he’d expected Julia to say that he just gapes at her, his mind swirling, heart lodged somewhere in his throat. “Excuse me?”

“You and Eliot,” she says, waving a hand in the air between Quentin and an imaginary Eliot next to him, as if to encompass the entirety of the scenario. As if it’s all supposed to be making sense. “All of that shit. I thought you’d moved past it, with Alice.”

“I’m confused,” Quentin says, through gritted teeth. He fucking _hates_ it when Julia does this, when she withholds information, when she pretends to think that Quentin already knows what she’s talking about, so he’s forced to knock himself down a peg by asking for an explanation. Patented Julia move. He’s not in the mood. He’s mid-cataclysm, working in emergency-mode. “What is ‘all of that shit’ supposed to mean, exactly?”

Julia frowns at him, studying his expression, and then sighs, rubbing a hand over her face again. “Oh, _Q._ Jesus. You followed him around like a puppy dog for years, did you really think I didn’t know? I was at that fucking party when the two of you started going at it like teenagers, remember?”

“I just.” Quentin pauses. Tries to think before he just starts talking. It’s a problem, he’s never been very good at figuring out what he means before he says it. “I think you’re missing the part where apparently he loves _me_ , though.”

“Please, Q,” she says at once. “Eliot’s always loved you. I thought it was just the elephant in the room we never talked about.”

It shouldn’t make him angry, but it _does_ , a little bit. “Alice says that you all used to talk about it, back in the day.”

“Not like— _maliciously_ , or anything,” Julia says at once, with a casual little shrug that makes a muscle jump in Quentin’s jaw. “Q, it was _obvious_. I’m sorry, honey, but I assumed you knew.”

“And you assumed I felt the same way but then I _got over it_?”

That part is almost comical to him, the idea of getting over something like Eliot, something like the way he _feels_ about Eliot. Maybe that’s why it’s easy for him to believe the truth now that it’s been spoon-fed to him; it seems insane, that Eliot could love him, but if the feeling between them _is_ love, then it’s not the kind of thing a person _gets over_ , it’s not the type of thing that has an ending.

They’re supposed to be friends, he and Julia. Julia’s supposed to know him better than anyone, because she was there for all the before-stuff, for the institutionalizations and the notes left on kitchen tables and the scars and the _shit_ that he managed to put—well, if not behind him, then at least off to the side where it poses a mere superficial obstacle to his daily life. And yet she thought that he’d _known_ that Eliot loved him, and had just decided not to do anything about it? (God, maybe that does sound like him. What a mess).

“I assumed…” Julia pauses, biting her lip. “I assumed you were protecting yourself, maybe protecting Eliot too. He’s an intense person, with a lot of baggage, and that kind of thing can’t be good when you’ve got your own shit to deal with.”

“He’s not—you think he’d be _bad_ for me?” Quentin asks, defensive. This thought honestly hadn’t even occurred. “He’s the best person I know, and if he’s got _baggage_ , so fucking what? He’s always taken care of me, _always_ , even when I couldn’t be bothered to return the favor.” He swallows, the shame burning up inside of him. “But that’s not even the fucking issue on the table here. I didn’t _know_ , Jules.”

“And if you’d known?”

This is the crux of it. Leave it to her to get there so quickly.

“I love him,” he says quietly, defeated. “I’m the worst person in the world and Alice deserves… I don’t know. So much more than whatever it is I’ve been offering her.”

“Yeah,” Julia says with a severe nod. “I’m not actually going to argue with you on that one, Q.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re not the worst person in the world,” Julia clarifies, with a slight gentling of her eyes. “But Alice doesn’t deserve this bullshit, so you’d better think long and hard about what you really want, before you—”

Oh shit, hadn’t he said?

“Julia,” Quentin says, laughing. “That train has left the fucking station, okay?”

“Okay…” Julia says, waiting for more.

“I’m not here to make pro and con lists, Alice vs. Eliot or some shit. There’s no _competition_. I’m here because I feel like _shit_ about how much there’s no competition. Like—seven years. What’s _wrong_ with me?”

He hadn’t come over here to be coddled or comforted, but it stings a bit when Julia refuses to say her line, when she doesn’t scoot over beside him on the floor, throw an arm around his shoulder, and say _nothing’s wrong with you, Q. Things are tough right now, but I’m here_.

He’s always been so annoyed at her mother hen routine, but somehow her disapproval, her distance, is ten thousand times worse. He’s starting to wonder why he _didn’t_ just cancel today’s lunch.

“Quentin,” she says, slow and precise. “What it sounds like you’re saying here is that you’ve been in love with someone, and in a serious relationship with someone _else_ , for several years. And if that is the case, then, yeah, sorry, that’s tremendously shitty. I don’t really know what to say to that.”

“I didn’t do it _knowingly,_ ” Quentin says. “It wasn't—it’s not like I’ve been—” he struggles to capture the revelations of the night before, the way he’d realized that the seeming impossibility of Eliot’s reciprocation had made his own feelings seem... beside the point. Irrelevant. Smaller, somehow. He hadn’t felt like he was betraying Alice in any way, but maybe he had been. Maybe the whole time. “I don’t know. I don’t have a defense,” he says, defeated.

“You’re miserable,” Julia informs him, like he doesn’t already know. He doesn’t dignify that with a response. “No, seriously,” she continues. “I don’t mean right now in this moment, I mean lately, you’ve been _miserable_. Has that been because of this? Because of Eliot?”

His instinct is to say no, of course not, because he hadn’t known there was anything to be miserable _about_ until yesterday. But after another moment of hesitation, he nods. His head is pounding with lack of sleep, with dehydration. He remembers Eliot going to get him a glass of water the night before, and has to swallow around another lump in his throat. “I didn’t see it,” he says, defeated. “I didn’t know.”

And now Julia does move, she does slide down off the couch to wrap an arm around him, and it _does_ make Quentin feel better, even though he knows he doesn’t deserve it. “Talk to me,” Julia says.

That’s all. A simple offering, an opening, for Quentin to spew out the nonsense swirling around in his mind until he finds the nugget of truth among the garbage.

Slowly, in fits and starts, Quentin tells her about Eliot’s birthday, the last time they’d seen each other, and then about New Years’ Eve, the dropped text, the catch-up lunch that never happened. He tells her that it happened so gradually he hadn’t really processed it on a conscious level, but that for a long time now, he’s felt his friendship with Eliot fading into the background of his life, getting further and further from what it once was. When they’re together (barring recent events), everything snaps into place like they still see each other every day, like they still orbit around one another constantly, but then weeks go by without a word. Before the three month gap between the end of October and last night’s disastrous visit, the gaps had been getting longer—once a month, once every other month, the texts coming farther apart, the subsequent conversations more perfunctory and basic.

And he talks about how that reality has been _hurting_ him, has been bleeding him dry, has made everything about his life worse in so many different tiny ways that it’s been death by a thousand cuts, a frog sitting in a pot of slowly warming water. He hadn’t noticed his heart being broken, because someone has been chipping away at it with the tiniest little sledgehammer, bit by bit by bit. And if he tries to identify the someone holding said sledgehammer, he has to admit it’s probably mostly _himself_.

But it’s Eliot, too. It has been Eliot, for a long time now.

“I thought you were the one who never texted him back,” Julia says, because she’s kind of the best and kind of the worst, and will never let him get away with anything.

“Yeah, and I feel like garbage about it, but that was… I don’t know, just one straw on the camel’s back, and not even the one that broke it. It was… it started…”

Julia is incredibly impatient with him sometimes, but today she gifts him with a neutral expression and sits very still, and waits for Quentin to explain himself. And he does—haltingly, inadequately, thinking through emotions he’s been feeling for years, without even noticing.

The thing was.

The thing _was_ … Eliot had kind of left him. Or at least, that’s how Quentin’s brain has been interpreting it, running _abandonment-issues.exe_ in the background, poisoning the rest of his processes in an subtle, ongoing way for years.

It had started when Eliot had practically _announced_ the end of their friendship as undergrad came to a close, with some bullshit about how much Q had meant to him, would always mean to him, how these years had been so wonderful because Quentin had been there, in his life. Generic stuff, really, not up to Eliot’s standards for dramatic flare, but it had stuck with Quentin because he’d said it all like this was the end of the book, not just the end of the chapter.

Never mind that they were both staying in the city, never mind that they had been inseparable for four years, had lived out of each other’s back pockets and had almost never gone a full day without talking to each other. Eliot had cast himself as the fun, queer, sunshine-sparkle in Quentin Coldwater’s life, the manic-pixie-dream-gay who Quentin had never quite gotten around to fucking, but would look back on with fondness, would run into one day at an alumni event and smile and nod and say _hey, we should grab lunch_ , but then never grab lunch.

_Quentin_ is the one who hadn’t been able to let go. Quentin is the one who kept reaching out tentative offers of continued friendship to El and Margo, kept being pathetically grateful that those offers were accepted. In the six and a half years since they’d all graduated, Quentin can honestly count on both hands the number of times that Eliot’s been the one to initiate plans. And Quentin is _bad_ at initiating plans. He always feels like a bother, always wonders if the reason people don’t reach out to him is because they’re sick and tired of taking care of him—he’d felt selfish, every time he’d talked to Eliot, and so as shitty as Quentin feels right now, as fucking god-awful and guilty, this entire mess isn’t actually all on him. Eliot had done that. Eliot had pulled away, and left Quentin grasping at what remained. And maybe after a while Quentin had stopped trying quite as hard. Maybe it hurt too much—can anyone really blame him?

(Maybe he’s just a bad friend and he always has been, counting on others to do the heavy lifting).

Trying to express all of that to Julia is difficult, because words are difficult right now, and _thinking_ is difficult right now, and he wants the cashmere sweater he’d accidentally stolen from Eliot back in their junior year, wants to be wearing it, pretending it smells like him even all these years later. But he doesn’t know where it is, and is starting to wonder if he might have given it to goodwill or something, which would be _just like him_ , wouldn’t it, to fail to anticipate the crash and burn of his own inevitably disastrous future, fail to guard himself against the worst of it by disposing of potential comfort items before he actually needs them.

He’d probably gotten rid of that sweater because it was _Eliot’s_ , and you don’t move in with your serious girlfriend still carting around an item of clothing that doesn’t even fit you, from your platonic best friend who you definitely hooked up with that one time in college, holding tight to each other like the world was ending, who definitely still kisses you on the cheek just-slightly-too-close to your mouth, and on the forehead, his nose nuzzling in to your hairline, and hugs you and cuddles with you on his twenty-ninth birthday after you go out for dinner and a show (Margo was there your honor, Margo was there the whole time), pressed up together back-to-chest on a too-small couch, lips tickling the back of your neck, the smell, the warmth, that _closeness_ that nobody else has ever offered…

Nothing happened. Alice had said so, and Quentin wouldn’t _lie_ to her. So nothing happened.

Julia seems unimpressed by Quentin’s rambling attempts to untangle all of this.

“Please,” she says, pursing her lips and gifting him with her most severe no-nonsense glare. “You think _Eliot Waugh_ got sick of you after graduation?”

“I’m always the one who makes plans!” Quentin repeats, like this means anything, like he hadn’t seen the look on Eliot’s _face_ last night, like he doesn’t already know the truth, the truth he’s forcing Julia to spell out for him right now.

“Maybe he was trying to spare himself some fucking heartbreak, Q,” Julia says, terribly gentle. “He’s been obsessed with you from the second he met you, okay? And you were happy with Alice. Or at least we all _thought_ you were happy with Alice.”

“I think I thought that too,” Quentin says. He doesn’t mean it as a defense. There’s something wrong inside of him, that he could have done this, that he could have dragged Alice along in a life that they’d both tolerated but never really relished. He’d seen it, he’s not actively stupid. He’d known, and he’d done nothing.

“I think... you need to figure your shit out, my friend,” Julia says, sanctimonious and _unhelpful_.

“I _told_ you—”

“You love him,” Julia says, blunt. It’s the first time someone has echoed it back to him, and it’s oddly affirming, like Quentin had needed someone else to tell him he’d gotten the answer right. “You love him, so what? What comes next?”

So Quentin goes home, and he tries to figure out the answer to that question.

***

Quentin has gone on a lot of Journeys of Self-Discovery and Healing in his life. Like, too many. And most of them were half-assed jobs, reactions to people he liked telling him he was a burden, instinctive push-back against a narrative of his own existence that seemed just a tad too pathetic, even for him.

Not all of these internal journeys have been total failures, of course. He’d gotten a different therapist and different meds during his senior year of high school, and had actually been motivated to try and improve the parts of his life that made him want to actively literally die. And it had worked, more or less—sure, he’s had to switch meds and adjust dosages and when he left NYU and moved and then moved again, he’d had to ping-pong between a couple of different doctors, but that journey, as cheesy as it is to call it that, has actually ended with a Quentin Coldwater who more or less has his shit together, who can weather the bad days and believe in the existence of future good ones.

This particular mission, to get his shit together, is particularly difficult. Because he’s doing the emotional labor, he’s going to therapy, he’s called out sick at work to give himself time to work on this without distraction. He’s taking his meds. He can’t just do an obvious thing and _fix this_ , and he _really_ wants to fix it. He doesn’t want to go back and undo the mistake, he wants to repair what’s broken, wants to step forward into a different kind of life in the aftermath. (And he wants to be happy without feeling like it’s at Alice’s expense.)

And Alice is the center of it all, really. Not Eliot. Eliot is—Eliot, he’ll deal with. He’ll apologize and either they’ll fall into each other’s arms the way Quentin keeps trying to pretend he’s not hoping for, or Eliot will forgive him because he _always_ forgives Quentin, and they’ll be friends again, in some form or other, no matter what, forever and always.

But Alice is a good person who did absolutely nothing wrong, and he can’t tell her the thing that will erase the heartbreak and put them back on the path of the status quo—there is no road forward that doesn’t dramatically alter Alice’s plans for her own future. Which makes it particularly painful to sit down with her on the couch Alice had taken with her from her last apartment, in front of the TV they’d bought together, and work through the crumpled remains of a shared life. He can’t not hurt her. He can’t fix it. He can’t even be stoic and sensible about it.

He cries a lot.

Alice cries, too.

It hurts like a motherfucker because he keeps apologizing and Alice keeps sitting there chewing on her lip and then she finally says— “I hope I’ll forgive you someday, because you’re really important to me,” which is so—it’s so _Alice_ , she’s not going to lie and say she’ll be fine, or that they’ll be fine, that they’re going to beat the odds and be those exes who actually stay friends. She doesn’t lie to accommodate other people’s feelings, she doesn’t soften things to make it less excruciating in the moment.

Quentin hopes they do beat the odds. He really does. Working in their favor is the fact that they have bridges between them, the same bridges that had introduced them back in college. Julia and Quentin are friends for life, there’s no untangling that shit. And Julia’s really close with Kady, who’s really close with Alice. They will see each other, they will have the opportunities to talk, it will be straight-up difficult _not_ to be a part of Alice’s world, even if that was what he ultimately wanted. He wants them to make it, and for them to take something good out of the years they had. Even if it takes a while. Even if it’s really hard.

Alice ends their big Official Breakup conversation with some really fucking harsh words, the kind of thing Quentin needs to hear but hates to hear, the kind of thing that sort of sends him down a spiral for the rest of the day and leads to him forgetting to eat dinner, falling asleep on the living room floor, and waking up to eat a tupperware full of cold pasta at one in the morning:

“You know, I always got the sense that something was between you and Eliot,” she says. “But I didn’t say anything, and I didn’t doubt our relationship, because I trusted you as an adult to be able to manage your feelings realistically. I put my trust in you to know how you felt, how you felt about _me_ , and because I trusted that, I’m standing here feeling like the last seven years, our entire relationship, was nothing but a waste of my time.”

Quentin swallows down his defensiveness, galled at the near-cruelty of this honesty, and he somehow manages to let Alice continue uninterrupted. “I’m saying this not to be a bitch,” she says, clear and precise. “I’m saying this so maybe you think about why it is you were able to ignore such an obvious, important part of your emotional landscape for so long. I’m saying it because honestly, Q, I think you probably should be talking to someone about it.”

Quentin nods at that, because Alice is right. As per usual.

And then at the door— “I’m resisting, though,” she says, soft and oddly tender, after the cold practicality of everything that came before. “That urge, to look back on seven years as a complete waste.”

“It wasn’t for me,” Quentin says at once. Finally, he knows the answer, knows the right thing to say. “I have a lot of regrets about how I’ve—about what I’ve done to you, to _us_ , Alice, but these years haven’t been wasted time. You mean so much to me, and I mean that in the true way, not the empty platitude way.”

“Yeah, I know,” Alice says. “At the end of the day, you’re actually really easy to read.”

She doesn’t kiss him on the cheek, but Quentin sees her eyes flicker, sees the slight lean of her body, sees her consider and then reject it. Instead, she squeezes his arm once in farewell, and throws out over her shoulder as she leaves— “I’ll call you, okay? To talk about the apartment and everything.”

And that’s that.

Well, it’s _not_ that, obviously, there’s going to be a lot more of _that_ moving forward. Quentin’s going to be deep in his feelings and so is Alice, and Alice is going to be angry for a long time and Quentin is going to mope and feel sorry for himself even if he gets everything he’s ever wanted. It’s an ouroboros of a character flaw, because feeling bad about it is the same thing as indulging in it, and self-pity isn’t a good look on anyone.

The other main part of his journey towards being slightly less of a selfish dickhead is actually easier, in its way, even though it comes with a sharper kind of visceral, nausea-inducing pain. This is because it’s not a journey towards an ending, not the relief of letting go, but instead the opposite of that, hope and dread and regret and eagerness keeping him on tenterhooks every second.

He texts Eliot once each morning. The first few are all similar: _I’m sorry. We need to talk. I need to see you. Please,_ and none of them yield any results.

After the talk with Alice, though, he adjusts strategy slightly: _I’ve been talking with Alice, and it’s definitely over. Please, please answer me. I need to see you. I can’t do this through a text message._

He thinks maybe that will provoke a response, and is crushed anew when it doesn’t.

The next morning, he tries: _No pressure if you don’t want to see me... maybe just text like an emoji or something to let me know to leave you alone? You don’t have to talk to me, obviously. I would understand that. But whenever you’re ready, El. Seriously, please call me anytime day or night, I have so much to say._

That doesn’t get a response either, but Quentin chooses to take the absence of a middle-finger emoji response as a _tentatively_ good sign.

Only once does he try the nuclear option, nine full days after he and Eliot last spoke, nine full days after Quentin had forced Alice to throw a grenade into the middle of everything. The text to Margo reads: _Is he okay?_

And the response comes immediately.

_No._

And then before Quentin can respond to that—

_Don’t fucking try it, Coldwater. I’m Switzerland._

She’s not, though. It’s sweet of her to say, but Margo’s on Eliot’s side, and if Quentin has truly fucked up to the degree that he’s lost Eliot forever, that means he’s lost Margo too. The ache sharpens to something acute, something that seems unsurvivable, and Quentin cries about it some more, which at this point has sort of become a part of the daily routine. (His therapist says the very fact that he’s been crying so much is a _good_ sign actually, as is the fact that even though he hasn’t gone to work in over a week, he didn’t cancel his appointment with his licensed mental health professional. His therapist (Greg) very kindly and yet insistently reminds him to think about other low moments in his life, when he hadn’t cried because he was too numb to feel anything, when he’d taken no steps to reach out or try to fix things, but had instead stayed in bed for so many days in a row that only the threat of hospitalization had forced him to take a painful step back towards the land of the living. On that note, with Greg’s words ringing in his ears, Quentin does make sure to change out of his pajamas every day, and he even manages to leave the apartment at least once every forty-eight hours, white-knuckling his phone the whole time, waiting for a call.)

This is how he exists, more or less, for the next two weeks. In limbo. He’s not doing _great_ , but he’s not—scared for himself, and he’s not to the point where he thinks Julia is unduly concerned either. For now, only a select few people even know about Alice and Quentin’s split. It’s going to be a thing, when he tells his dad. It’s going to be a _thing_ -thing when he tells his mother. Fucking shit. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he’s constructed an excuse—until things are fixed with Eliot, whatever that ends up looking like, he doesn’t have the full story to present to either of his parents. Or to his workplace acquaintances. Or to his friends, those who don’t already know.

(They all already know, of course, because Julia knows so James knows, and Alice has been staying with Kady and if Kady knows then Penny knows, and Eliot—Eliot knows. He knows, and he hasn’t texted _back_.)

The limbo continues, and Quentin keeps forcing himself to take a shower and do his laundry and eat regular meals, because if Eliot does call, or show up, or reach out in any way shape or form, he’s trying not to be an utterly pathetic fall-down-fuck-up-disaster for the conversation to follow. You know, just trying to do things a little different, for once. He does some work from home, because his job isn’t the type of thing you can just stop doing for two weeks without advanced notice and a lot of guilt-tripping and veiled threats from the powers that be, but he can hardly focus on the contracts in front of him, and just winds up carrying his laptop from room to room, reminded everywhere of Alice, reminded always of the lack of Eliot.

And then when he does get the message from Eliot, he’s nowhere close to ready for it. It just... shows up, out of nowhere. Just. At seven o’clock at night, on a Tuesday. A text message. From Eliot.

Quentin is an absolute mess more or less immediately, in direct defiance of all the careful ways he’d tried to make himself presentable, and his fingers literally shake when he clicks on the push notification so he can reply.

.....

_Are you home?_

_Yes._

_Buzz me up?_

.....

And Quentin does.


	4. Chapter Four

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been so happy that this fic is resonating so much with everyone! Thank you so, so much!! The last chapter was kind of mean with the cliffhanger ending... so here, have a much longer installment as an apology for my cruelty.

For Eliot’s twenty-ninth birthday, Quentin had gone a little overboard, excited to show off a bit, perhaps, with his new outrageous salary, because even swimming in debt from law school, it turns out that if you get a job at a top firm in New York City, you kind of start making bank from day one. So he’d bought three tickets to _Les Mis_ , (actual good seats, not dead center fifth row or anything, but not on the mezzanine either), and he’d booked reservations at a fancy restaurant, and he’d told Margo and Eliot to clear their schedules, and he’d taken the two of them out to celebrate.

It would have made sense for Alice to come along, but she’d been buried neck-deep in a work thing, and Quentin _had_ asked her, before buying the tickets, he’s not actually _that_ much of an inconsiderate monster, so in the end it had just been the three of them.

And _god_ , it had been so nice. It’s not until Quentin shows up at Margo and Eliot’s door for a bit of pre-gaming that he realizes it’s been _months_ since the three of them have hung out alone. Sure, there had been Kady and Penny’s wedding back in July, they’d all been there for that, and Quentin’s birthday, and plenty of other occasions to see them, but it’s always in a crowd, it’s always fleeting, no real time to sink in to one another and _talk_.

So they do. They talk, the three of them slipping into that familiarity from their earliest years of friendship, smiles and affection and laughter spilling over all the way through drinks, through dinner, through the walk to the theatre. El and Margo regale him with stories about their weird artsy friends, and for once Quentin doesn’t feel on the outside looking in; he feels like he’s a part of the joke, like he’s a part of their world. And only in feeling that does he realize how _little_ he’s been feeling that lately. It’s a melancholy thought but he drowns it in another glass of wine, and he lets Eliot wrap an arm around his shoulder as they saunter their way to the theatre.

As they take their seats, Margo starts rifling through the program and Eliot starts explaining the plot to Q, scoffing when Quentin says he’s read the book, as if that isn’t literally over a thousand pages of context right there, and the two of them bicker like the old friends they are, right through until the overture begins.

Quentin watches the show, and he also watches Eliot watching the show. There’s something about El when he’s on a stage—he’s seamless, dynamic, himself but not himself, not a chameleon who could play any part in the world, but instead the kind of person who finds a kernel of himself in every character he inhabits, because, god, his _empathy_ is just off the charts, Q’s always been in awe of it. But when Eliot’s watching others perform… it’s maybe the only time Quentin sees him truly relax. He just—melts, and lets himself get swept away, lets himself truly _enjoy_ without the necessity of keeping his own mask up.

During intermission, Margo and Eliot bend their heads together and start a minute and incomprehensible performance review on all of the lead actors, and roll their eyes at Quentin when he shrugs and says he thought Fantine sounded pretty.

And then after, they go back to Margo and El’s place. This is the mistake, this is the moment when Quentin should have headed back home, having sobered up during the three-hour show, but god, he hadn’t wanted the evening to end. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so _happy_ , in an uncomplicated, guileless sort of way. Work is hard, the day-to-day is drudgery, and Eliot and Margo are so full of _life_ , and that life is complicated and twisty and they have their own coping mechanisms, of course they do, it’s not always easy, but Quentin is fully himself when he’s with them. He’s the version of himself that he hates the least, loves the most, and at that moment, the energy of the night, the glass of wine Eliot pours him as soon as they walk in the door, the warmth of Margo and El both next to him on the couch, it’s enough to make Quentin forget about the life he’s been working so hard to build, and live in the moment instead.

They watch a movie, a rom-com, and Margo and Eliot quote large swaths of it out loud but then mercilessly tear it apart at other moments, Quentin calls them both hypocrites and tries to get them to agree that the movie is actual garbage and that they suck for liking it, and they call him snobby, and then… Margo falls asleep, halfway through, jerking herself awake a few minutes later to slink off to bed, patting Eliot and Quentin both on the head as she departs. So then it’s just Quentin resting his head against Eliot’s arm, and the movie continuing on, and Quentin remembering to send Alice a text that he’ll be crashing on Eliot’s couch.

For the record, he does crash on Eliot’s couch. It’s just… Eliot crashes there with him. He can pretend they just fell asleep watching the movie and woke up with cricks in their necks, but no—they’d been awake enough to get up, to change into more comfortable clothes, for Eliot to stare at Quentin for an oddly long time in the too-big sweatpants and t-shirt that he’d taken from Eliot’s dresser (Quentin feigns shock that Eliot even _owns_ such pedestrian items, and Eliot makes fun of him for being such a pocket-sized little human, positively drowning in fabric), and for them to return back to the couch to stay up a little longer and talk.

And talk and talk and _talk_ and then somehow lay down facing each other in the gloom, the city lights shining through the smallest crack in the curtains, the sound of the sleepless city unnoticed after so many years living among the chaos. The couch is pretty big, wide enough for two grown men to lay down side by side, but not wide enough for two grown men to lay down side by side without touching quite a lot of each other. But that’s okay, because it’s Eliot and it’s Quentin and they’re just like this, and Quentin is buzzed, and Eliot is _warm_ , and he honestly doesn’t think he’s doing anything wrong when he drifts off to sleep in the circle of his best friend’s arms.

In the morning, Quentin discovers that he’s the little spoon, that sometime in the night they’ve moved, and Eliot’s pulled a blanket from somewhere to cover them up, that Eliot is pressed up against him everywhere, chest-to-back, one of Eliot’s knees pressed between Quentin’s legs, Eliot’s arms around him, pulling him in close. For the briefest moment, Quentin lets himself relax back into those arms. His body is responding like this is something familiar, being held instead of doing the holding (not that Alice is much of a cuddler), sinking back into an embrace full of protection and love and care. He’s only half awake, is what he tells himself, when he squirms back and pulls Eliot’s arm tighter around his waist. He’s not responsible for the little sigh of contentment he makes when he feels Eliot’s lip graze the shell of his ear.

Eliot presses forward, Quentin presses back, and it’s all plausible deniability, they’re both still sleeping, really, it doesn’t mean anything if one of Quentin’s hands comes down to grip around Eliot’s wrist, it doesn’t matter that he’s actually-wide-awake and wondering what it would feel like if he moved his hand still further, tangled their fingers together, maybe brought their joined hands up to his mouth and pressed a kiss to Eliot’s knuckles. And Eliot’s just stretching, his mouth just happens to open ever so slightly as he presses it into the skin of Quentin’s neck.

It’s nothing, really.

Margo comes into the room and that wakes them up, and they untangle themselves with no real fanfare. Eliot makes coffee, Quentin changes back into his crumpled clothes from the night before, he hugs both of them goodbye, and he goes home.

***

Eliot looks like shit. Not in any of the obvious ways—he’s perfectly put together, his clothes pressed, his hair styled to look like dishevelment. But Quentin has made a study of Eliot Waugh over the years. He’s spent far too much time looking at that face. He sees the circles under his eyes, the pinched corners of his lips. He hasn’t been sleeping, and it’s not for the fun reasons he _usually_ hasn’t been sleeping.

Quentin, inappropriately, illogically, smiles wide. “Oh god. Fuck, it’s so good to see you. Come in.”

He’s not really nervous, is the weird thing. Anxious about the specifics of this conversation, yes, but he’s been obsessing over the last time he and Eliot talked _quite_ a bit over the last few days, and it’s not lost on him that Eliot hadn’t denied Quentin’s assertion. Eliot could have brushed it off, denied it, moved right on past it, and he _didn’t_. As far as starting places go, as far as building-blocks with which to construct a possible future happiness, Quentin figures _we’re in love with each other_ isn’t a bad place to start.

(He’s not stupid enough to think that’s enough all on its own, however. If it was, they wouldn’t be in this situation to begin with.)

“Come in, sit down,” Quentin says, all jittery nerves and a strange, overpowering joy. He’s trying to tamp it down, aware that this conversation might kind of _suck_ for a minute, because he sucks, because he’s messed up so fucking bad—but he wants to get to it, he’s excited to get through it.

“No, I—” Eliot says, the first words Quentin has heard him say in seventeen days. “I don’t know how long I’m gonna stay, Q.”

Quentin looks at him, searching for the anger in his voice, be he mostly just seems _tired_. “Okay,” he says. “Okay? Are you? Okay?”

And Eliot walks into the room, Quentin closes the door, Eliot leans back against the door, like he wants to be close to the exit. Quentin’s… not quite sure how he’s refraining from rushing forward and hugging him until he can finally breathe again. But something’s wrong. Something’s obviously very wrong. (Obviously. _Obviously_ ).

“Tell me what you want me to say to her,” Eliot says.

“What?” Quentin’s so happy to see him he thinks he might cry. He’s having trouble processing the words.

“To Alice,” Eliot says, swallowing. “I’ll go to her, I’ll tell her—I’ll tell her she’s wrong, or that I’m over it. Whatever she needs to hear to fix things, and then—I’ll go, okay? I’ll let you go, for real this time, the way I was supposed—”

The first tear surprises Quentin, splashing out hot and rolling down his cheek before he has a chance of stopping it. Eliot isn’t looking at him, and Quentin debates brushing the tear away before he can see it, but then decides against it. His hands feel like lead weights.

“That’s why you came over here?” he says. Tiny. Miserable. He doesn’t understand what’s happening, it’s like the world has suddenly turned upside down. Is he being an idiot? Did Eliot love him _once_ but not anymore? But that doesn’t make sense, does it? He might have the world’s lowest self-esteem, but all signs point to… “You’re offering to help get me back with Alice?”

Eliot looks up at him, at the sound of his voice, and his own eyes widen when he sees that Quentin’s crying.

“Q, I’m so _sorry_ ,” he says, radiating anguished sincerity. He takes a step forward but then freezes, still several feet away. “I tried—I tried _not_ to, Quentin, I swear, I’ll do better, if you let me talk to her I can fix this, and you don’t have to invite me to your wedding, I’m not mad, I shouldn’t have gotten mad, I _get_ it.”

It sucks to see Eliot like this, see him so upset, but a wave of something akin to relief washes through Quentin, supplanting the creeping possibility of despair. In that moment, with the kind of clarity that comes along only a few times in a lifetime, but which has been bonking Quentin over the head on a near daily basis over the last couple of weeks, Quentin realizes that Eliot very much does _not_ get it. It’s kind of comforting, actually, to be the one with a better grasp on the situation, for once.

“Sit down,” Quentin repeats.

“Where’s Alice?” Eliot asks. He doesn’t move.

“El, she’s at Kady’s,” he says, very gently, fighting for calm. “She hasn’t been staying here with me. Because we’re not together anymore.”

“I can fix it,” Eliot repeats, stubborn, but he doesn’t resist when Quentin comes forward and tugs on his wrist, guiding him over to the couch. Eliot sits down like a lead weight, and he looks down at his knees like he can’t bear to meet Quentin’s eyes.

It’s the most devastating of all possible scenarios, and Quentin doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. The last few weeks of his life have been revelation after revelation, each one designed to make him look like the bad guy—because he is the bad guy—but he’s had to have the truth spoon-fed to him by others. By Alice, by Julia, even by Eliot, through his silence. He’s not sure how to proceed, now that he’s no longer the one missing a piece of information.

(He tries to start slow, but probably fucks it up).

“These last few months,” he says, very carefully, like he’s afraid of spooking a cat. “I thought I was depressed because I was working too hard and because it’s winter and I fucking hate winter, and yeah, that’s—that’s part of it, but I’ve mostly been low because I haven’t been talking to you. There’s just been this great big gaping hole in my chest and I got into another stupid fight with my mother over Christmas, did I tell you that? No, of course I didn’t, because we haven’t been _talking_ , El. And it’s been awful. We haven’t really talked since your birthday. Why is that?”

Eliot finally snaps a look up at him, and there’s a hint of defiance there, a straightening of his spine that means he’s still _Eliot_ , still as resilient as ever, under everything else. “That’s a stupid question and you’re not stupid.”

“But nothing happened.”

“By the skin of my _fucking_ teeth,” Eliot hisses out, looking back down at his hands folded in his lap. “I can’t make you a cheater, Quentin. I’ve been toeing at that line for literal years and I can’t cross it. You’ll hate me for it, and it’ll kill me.”

“You can’t make me a cheater anymore, Eliot,” Quentin says, willing him to understand. “I’m fucking _single_ now, okay? Alice and I are done, and that’s—”

“Why are you being mean to me?” Eliot says, his voice high and rough and pained. “God, I’m sure I deserve it, but _why_? I’m trying so hard to be a good person here, I’m trying, and you’re— _look_ at you, I’m not a fucking _robot_ , Quentin, I can’t just keep on like this.”

“I’m not,” Quentin says. “I’m not trying to—oh my god, will you please just look at me for a second?”

Eliot does, and Quentin stares at him dead on. He knows the answer to this question, but suddenly he needs to hear it, more than he’s ever needed to hear anything. “Was Alice wrong, then? Because if she was wrong about you, about how you feel, that’s—I need to know that. I need to know that right now.”

“You’re being such an asshole,” Eliot says, and maybe he means to make it sound angry but his lip is wobbling, his shoulders slumped, he looks so goddamn _sad_. It’s answer enough. It’s enough to make Quentin feel like the biggest piece of shit.

“I’m sorry,” Quentin says. “I’m so sorry that you felt like you had to come here and _apologize_ when I’m the one who fucked everything up. I always put that on you, I always stand around and wait for you to fix everything, and—god, I thought you needed time, that’s the only reason I didn’t come over and pound on your door until you let me in. I thought I was giving you space to be _mad_ at me, but if that’s not—”

“I can’t do this,” Eliot says, groaning and scrubbing a hand over his face. “Q, fuck, you know I—but can you just—I can’t.”

It sounds like he’s trying to ask Quentin something, but Q honestly doesn’t know what. No complete thought, nothing Quentin can do or say to fix this, except—maybe, if the glimmer of hope inside of him means _anything_ —the truth.

Quentin sniffs, trying to keep his composure. “I didn’t want to invite you to my stupid wedding because I was terrified that if I saw you there I wouldn’t go through with it. And the thing is, El, this whole time, Alice wanted me, okay? It’s not an excuse, but she wanted me, and maybe she didn’t even _like_ me half the time but at least she really _wanted_ me—”

“How—” Eliot says, and his eyes are frantic now, darting over every part of Quentin’s face. “How can you think I don’t—”

“What?” Quentin says. “Can you please say it? Just say it once, so I know I’m not insane, so I know it’s not just _me_?”

Eliot’s nostrils flair, and he flinches back into the couch like he’s just been slapped. “You’re the one who’s had a steady girlfriend for the past seven years, Q. Don’t act like I’m the one sending mixed signals.”

“You—I’m bad at—I didn’t get the signals, okay? No signals! None! Because I’m an _idiot_ , Eliot, and you’re supposed to know that about me.”

“Quentin.”

“No, listen, I’m moping around here like my world is ending, barely getting any sleep, and I just broke up with someone I’ve been in a relationship with for _seven years_ , you know? That’s—that should be why I’m sad, but it’s _not_. I can’t even—process my breakup feelings or whatever, because _you_ —because _we’ve_ been—”

Why can’t he say it? Why doesn’t he know how to salvage this conversation? Why, over the endless days and nights of obsessing over everything he’s missed from his past with Eliot, did he not _practice what he wanted to say_?

“You’re not supposed to be sad because of me,” Eliot says, and he has the audacity to sound _pissed off_ at him suddenly. And Quentin has no right to be mad about that, because of course Eliot _should_ be pissed, he really should, but he should be pissed off about Quentin’s behavior, not about the fact that Quentin has _missed_ him, and has been sad for making _him_ sad, and this whole thing is just a cycle, is just two people making each other miserable from a distance, and how is _that_ what they’ve become to each other, here?

He just needs to make it through this gauntlet, just needs to cut past the bullshit. He can’t find the key to that, somehow. He can’t do anything but keep apologizing, because Eliot is in pain, it’s Quentin’s fault, and he can’t even explain well enough to fix _any_ of it.

“I’m sorry. God, El, I’m so _sorry_ , I’m a disaster, it’s not your job to—you’re under no obligation to tell me how you feel, I mean, I haven’t even been single for… for _most_ of the time we’ve known each other, and god, isn’t that—that feels so wrong, I just…”

“I can fix it,” Eliot repeats again. “Let me help you. Let me fix this.”

“You’re not hearing me,” Quentin says, and then wonders if that’s even true. He doesn’t even know what he’s trying to say, other than—well, other than this. “El, I don’t want to marry Alice, okay? If I’d wanted to marry her, and if she’d wanted to marry me, we would have fucking done it already.”

Eliot shakes his head, not… not in disagreement, just, like he’s trying to process it. “But you’re heartbroken.”

 _Entirely because of you_ , Quentin wants to say, doesn’t say. Alice isn’t here, but even so, saying that wouldn’t be fair to her. It’s important that at least a sliver of his current pain is attributable to her. To losing her. To finding her spare pair of glasses in the drawer of the end table in the living room, and wondering whether it would be okay to text her, or whether _needing space_ meant a moratorium on all contact. It’s sad, not being able to talk to someone he’d talked to every day for the better part of a decade.

But for all this time he’s barely been speaking to Alice, he hasn’t been talking to Eliot, either, and he’s not going to lie to himself about which one hurt more. Logic doesn’t come into it. It never does, with Eliot.

“Yeah,” Quentin says, very quietly. “Eliot, I didn’t know how you felt. I didn’t realize. That’s why things are over with Alice. That’s what changes everything for me.”

Eliot doesn’t seem to be listening to him, though. He stands up from the couch and takes a few steps towards the door, and Quentin’s heart seizes up in his chest, wondering if Eliot’s just going to walk away. Maybe he’s going to track down Alice, declare emphatically that whatever fucked up feelings he’d once had for Quentin, they’re gone now, and Alice is welcome to have him, he won’t stand in the way, really, and it’s time to do some purging of his old contacts anyway, no need to keep the hangers-on hanging-on, what with the new life he’s built for himself, and so really, he’d prefer _not_ to be invited to the wedding, if it’s all the same, because at this point it would be kind of weird to come to an event for people he doesn't really give a shit about anymore, but he wishes them well, he really does, and he’ll send a fucking blender in the mail.

The part of Quentin thinking that is the part of Quentin that got him into this mess in the first place, so he shoves the thought away, firmly.

Eliot doesn’t leave, because of course he doesn’t. He’s a good person, and even if he _is_ done with Quentin, he’ll be nice about it. When he turns to look at Quentin, though, the look on his face… and when he speaks, it sounds like every word escaping from his mouth is painful. Deadly sincere, utterly anguished. “I’m always ruining everything for you. I come into your life and I disrupt everything, I can’t be _trusted_ with you, that’s—Margo—Margo says I’m not the monster here, but your girlfriend, fucking _fiancée_ , who you _love_ , just left you because of me, because I can’t keep my shit together, and you’re too busy worrying about me to even process that—”

“You don’t disrupt my life!” Quentin yells, loud enough to shut Eliot up. He takes advantage of the silence. “Fuck, El. _Seriously_. What the fuck. I’m supposed to be the one with the goddamn martyr complex, not you. You’re—you don’t disrupt my life, you _are_ my—I have no fucking clue what my life is without you. I mean that. You’re _everything_ to me.”

It’s always been true. And it’s not even like Quentin hasn’t _known_ that before now, all that time he was floating along with Alice. God, he’s been so abominably unfair to her, but somehow he’d convinced himself that what he feels for Eliot isn’t ordinary love, isn’t something as utterly pedestrian and practical as romance. That sort of thing wasn’t real, not the way they talked about it in books and movies. You meet a nice person, you make each other smile, you enjoy spending time with them, you make a plan and you stick to it. It keeps you comfortable, but it isn’t actually a thing that makes you _happy_.

He liked being with Alice, but Eliot has always been the one who makes him _so, so happy_. So he didn’t love him, it was too _much_ for that to be it. Too much feeling, too much _need_ , to be something as apparently common and messy and painful as _love_.

And now that Quentin recognizes it for what it is, he can only hate himself for ever ignoring it in the first place. He can only pray there’s still something left of what he’s spent years tearing apart, without even noticing.

“That can’t be true,” Eliot says. His voice is hoarse like he’s been screaming. “I’m not. I’m—you don’t think of me like that. You don’t think of me.”

 _You don’t think of me_.

Quentin swallows down the bile, hating himself worse in this moment than he can remember ever hating himself before. He can’t let Eliot think that. He _can’t_ let Eliot think that, for even another second.

“Every day,” Quentin says, his throat burning. He stands up from the couch and crosses to him. Eliot doesn’t come forward, but he doesn’t step back, either. “Every hour. Every time something pisses me off at work, I want to tell you. Every time I hear a funny joke, I wonder if you’d like it. I listen to musical soundtracks so I’ll understand your references better, I keep my eyes open whenever I go _anywhere_ in case I see something that might be good enough to give you for your next birthday or whatever. Every time I get to the end of a day and I feel kind of shitty for no specific reason, it’s mostly because we haven’t talked, that I haven’t texted you or seen your face or heard your voice, and that makes everything darker, everything _worse_.”

“Q,” Eliot says. He sounds terrified. “But you never. I didn’t. I—”

“I thought I was bothering you, okay?” Quentin says, the confession strained. It almost feels like a small thing, next to everything else going on, but this is part of it, this has _always_ been part of it. “I thought you were done with me.”

“How could you possibly—” Eliot says, his face twisted in incredulity.

Quentin almost laughs, but holds on to the edges of his sanity. He needs to stay focused. He needs to _say_ this, because there’s something waiting on the other side. There is, he just needs to _focus_ and _get there_.

“You pulled away,” Quentin says, crossing his arms across his stomach, the pain of it even more clear now, only in the fullness of seeing Eliot here, in forcing the words out. “You—we graduated, and you waltzed away like you didn’t care if—and I’m bad at being friends with people, I mean, Julia just like—shows up and demands my attention, but I don’t know how to do that. You always did that. At school. You always showed up and just took me with you, and every time you made me feel so _special_ , like I mattered, and maybe it’s on me, maybe I took for granted that you’d keep managing our friendship, maybe I should have _tried_ harder, but back then you were always just _there_ , and—”

“Because I couldn’t stay away,” Eliot says, and he takes a stuttering step forward, like Quentin is a magnet, and he’s fighting a losing battle against the natural force. “I should have. I was supposed to, but I couldn’t. I tried.”

“ _Why_?” Quentin’s not sure if he’s asking why Eliot thought he should have stayed away, or why he wasn’t able to do so. Eliot answers the former.

“Because I hurt everything, I break everything, permanence isn’t—I’m not built for—”

“But you pulled _away_ ,” Quentin repeats, because that’s something he understands, not whatever bullshit Eliot believes about his own self-worth, his own capacity for permanent connection. That seems like a bigger problem. “And I didn’t know how to keep you, I—you made me reach out, and you—every time I invited you somewhere, you said yes, but you never invited _me_ , and you had all these new cool friends and I am _aware_ I sound like an insecure middle schooler right now but that’s why I never—I never realized, El, because I thought—I don’t know, you know me, I get—get in my head, you know me, El, you know m-me better than anyone, and I thought you were just like—indulging your nerdy friend from undergrad who couldn’t move the fuck on—”

“No, I—I hate that, that’s never, that’s not—”

“So then _why_ did you—”

“I thought Alice made you happy,” Eliot says, and he sounds desperate now. “I couldn’t—I knew _I_ couldn’t, and if she could, then—and I can’t be around you and not—I can’t be your fucking platonic _friend_ , Quentin, for fuck’s sake, I’ve never been able to _do_ that, so how was I supposed—”

It’s too much. It’s all too much. Quentin wants to strangle him. Quentin _loves_ him.

“El, I miss you every day,” he says, cutting him off. “I miss you, and I’ve been miserable, and Alice and I have been polite roommates for the better part of the last _year_ , and I didn’t even notice, I didn’t even _care_ , because she’s not the person I—and I wake up and I go to work and I’m twenty-eight years old and I still miss being fucking nineteen like some kind of loser who never moved on from college. I think those were the happiest years of my life, and it was entirely _you_ , and I can’t go back there, and, god, I think I hate my _job_ , but I can’t just _quit_ —I’m in _debt_ —” he’s full-on sobbing now, and then Eliot’s arms are around him and the feeling of being _held_ is so wonderful that he feels yet another surge of guilt at the fact that he’s never once been truly comforted by a hug from Alice, and that thought, the renewed knowledge that she was right, that she’s _always_ been right, is a knife to the gut—

“Q, no. No, that’s not—please, I’m sorry,” Eliot says, and he’s hugging him so tight, and Quentin is hugging back, sinking into him, head buried in his chest. He’s trying very hard not to go entirely limp, not to let go of all of his worries and make Eliot literally lift him up off of the ground. He’s good at it, is the thing. Eliot is so _good_ at being there for him, at easing his stress, at taking on every bit of pain so that Quentin won’t have to feel it anymore. Apparently, he’s been hiding a part of himself away in a box so he wouldn’t hurt Quentin, so he wouldn’t get in the way of what he saw as Quentin’s most obvious path to happiness.

He was wrong, he’d been wrong the whole time—but that doesn’t change the gift of what he’d been trying to do.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Quentin says, and he shifts in Eliot’s arms, pulling up and away just enough so he can look up into his eyes. What he sees there is—confusing.

The same thing that always happens between them is happening now, a charge to the air, an energy in the room, that thing that would be so easy to fall into, that thing that Quentin has never let himself look in the eye. He looks at it now, watches Eliot’s eyes dart over his face, concern and affection bleeding from every inch of him. He feels the press of Eliot’s hands on his waist, soft but firm, ready to support or to release, at the slightest hint from Quentin. Letting Quentin lead, letting him dictate the boundaries between them.

And to think, at any point in the last _decade_ , if Quentin had decided he wanted that boundary pushed a little further, he could have just—

But he wouldn’t, because he’s a coward. He’s been a coward, and a fool. “El, I’m. Everything’s so…”

“Yeah,” Eliot says, as though he understands what Quentin is trying to say. Quentin’s not sure _he_ knows what he’s trying to say, but he’s glad Eliot does. “Yeah, everything’s _so_.”

“You’re the one who makes me happy,” Quentin says, still staring right into Eliot’s eyes. Because some revelations feel important enough to say out loud. “Just. You’ve always done that and I’ve taken it for granted. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

Eliot looks at him, just stares at him, the same way Quentin is staring back. They’re awfully close to each other, standing in the entryway to Quentin and Alice’s apartment, some invisible force making them sway just slightly in each other’s arms. If Quentin pressed up—

And he’s doing it even as he thinks the thought, bringing their faces together, their lips inches apart.

Eliot pulls in a tiny intake of air, and then lets it out, fanning his breath over Quentin’s face. His lips purse tight, and Quentin hears him swallow, tight and afraid. There’s a coil of tension at the base of Quentin’s spine. Time is frozen, here, it’s an honest-to-god Point of No Return but why would he ever want to go back?

And then Eliot—Eliot—Eliot—

Kisses him.

His lips taste just a little bit like brandy, and they’re soft, and warm, and Quentin feels the tension melt out of him like it was never there. One of his arms pulls tighter around Quentin’s waist, and his other hand comes up, cupping his face, curling around the back of Quentin’s neck, sliding fingers through Quentin’s hair. It’s still just slightly damp from the shower he’d taken at five in the afternoon because time is meaningless, Quentin realizes, and then stops realizing it, because his brain is full of nothing but what’s happening to him, the realization of everything he’s never quite known he wanted. Eliot kisses him like he’s afraid Quentin will disappear, achingly soft and gentle and tender, and Quentin has _never been kissed_ like this before, he’s never known. He’s never _known_.

“Oh my god,” Eliot says when he pulls away, and his breath hitches a little bit. “Oh my god.”

“What?”

“I just—I’ve been thinking about doing that for _ten years_ , Q.”

Quentin laughs, some instinct to distance himself from the reality of those words, but Eliot is shaking his head, pulling Q against him, the hand cradling Quentin’s head under the curtain of his hair squeezing a little tighter, keeping him in place.

“I mean it. I’ve wanted you—you can’t imagine, darling.”

Quentin kisses him again, because—god, because how can he not? He sinks into it, warm wet, slick slide. Fucking perfect. “We _have_ kissed before, you know,” Quentin reminds him as he pulls back, but Eliot just shakes his head again, their noses brushing past each other, their faces still so close.

“At the time, I thought I was blowing up my friendship with you, I thought I was being the world’s most selfish jackass. I never thought—”

“There were two people there that night, El. You didn’t... I wanted you. I wanted—”

“Yeah?”

“So much. After—god, I’m not putting this on you, I’m not trying to make it all one-sided or anything, but if you’d _said_ something then? I would have picked you, if I’d known you were an option.”

Eliot squeezes his eyes shut like he’s in pain. And huffs out a sound that Quentin can’t quite interpret. He presses his forehead harder into Quentin’s, like he needs the grounding.

“I can’t—believe this is happening right now?” Eliot says, and it comes out like a question.

“It’s happening,” Quentin promises him.

“I need—to sit,” Eliot says, decisively, and he steers Quentin back over to the couch in a daze. They’re still touching, still wrapped up in each other, as they flop back down, but Eliot’s eyes have glazed over, like he can’t quite figure out where he is or what he’s doing here.

“El?”

“I just—” Eliot starts, and then coughs, shaking his head, and removes his hands from around Quentin’s waist. “I need you to know that this is _not_ why I came over here.” He sounds a little hysterical, his head buried in his hands, voice coming out higher than it should. “God. What the fuck is even happening?”

“El,” Quentin says, although he’s not sure he has anything to say afterwards. Just— _El_. He kind of can’t believe this is happening either. “I’m such an abominable fuck-up, and I’m really sorry. And. I love you. Okay? I love you. I need you to know that. I probably should have said that the second you walked through the door, I just… suck, I guess. At. Talking.”

“You’re very good at talking,” Eliot contradicts at once. “Just very bad at saying what you mean.”

“Pot, kettle,” Quentin says, and it’s a feeble joke, but Eliot looks up at him, and he’s still shaking, he’s still pale, but he’s _smiling_.

“You fucking _love_ me?” he says, like he needs to confirm. “That’s—a thing you’re sure about?”

“Definitely.”

“Oh my _god_.”

“And that’s a good thing, right?” Quentin asks, just to be sure.

Eliot shoots him an incredulous look. “Yes, fuck yes, it’s a good thing. It’s—oh god, Margo is going to be so _insufferable_ about this—”

Quentin laughs, a little too loud, but he’s giddy, and his brain is so _quiet_ , it’s like nothing else is going on, like the idea of _consequences_ has decided to take the rest of the day off, to just let him enjoy this, this perfect, impossible thing that’s happening to him right now.

“You have no fucking idea, Q,” Eliot says, and his voice cracks on the last word, that simple shortened name that always sounds more intimate coming out of Eliot’s mouth. He’s been proud, always, to warrant that level of familiarity from Eliot, from a person he knows so _well_ , but yet somehow still seems larger than life, separate and above the mundane concerns of mere mortals. Quentin hasn’t been putting Eliot on a pedestal—he knows him, knows all the bad that comes along with the overwhelming good—but he _has_ been putting him on a different planet, a different realm, from which Eliot could visit but never… never _stay_. Quentin had never imagined that Eliot might _want_ to stay.

“Tell me, then,” Quentin says. “Tell me.”

But Eliot just shakes his head a little helplessly, and then suddenly they’re kissing again. It’s rougher this time, Eliot’s arms tight around him, his mouth slanting, sliding against Quentin’s prying him open, tongues tangling, teeth clicking and nipping, and Quentin’s whole body is on fire, his soul is vibrating in time with the thumping of their hearts.

He doesn’t process the movement, doesn’t exactly know who pushes, who pulls, who guides and decides, but Eliot is sitting there on the couch and then Quentin is _in his lap_ , and they’re animals about it, in no time flat. Eliot keeps biting at him, his body shuddering and rolling and pushing up into Quentin above him, and Quentin is pressing _down-down-down_ , anchoring, insistent, trapping Eliot, Eliot who would never want to escape, who wants to stay, who wants to consume and be consumed because he _loves_ —because they’re in _love_.

“Q, fuck,” Eliot says, tearing his mouth away and going for Quentin’s throat. “Jesus, I’ve wanted—I’ve dreamed—god, I think about you—too much, like, a creepy amount, you’d probably have me arrested for being a fucking perv if you knew—”

Quentin laughs, delighted, and grabs Eliot’s face between both of his hands, pulling his face back up so he can kiss him on the mouth again, and is this what this is supposed to _feel_ like? Is it supposed to be so intense and lovely and _hot_ and perfect to kiss someone, to love someone like this? God, he owes Alice another apology. He owes Eliot another apology. He might even owe _himself_ an apology, when it comes right down to it, because _this_ is—

Escalating, is what it’s doing. Quentin’s getting hard, and he can feel Eliot is too, and he kind of can’t breathe, he definitely can’t really _think_ right now, all he wants to do is sit on this couch, sit in Eliot’s lap, kiss him until the world ends. He wants—

“Wait,” Eliot says, and he’s gasping for breath, and Quentin ignores him at first, nuzzling back in, dipping his tongue back into Eliot’s mouth, swallowing the distressed moan he makes, there’s _power_ to this, to the control he has over Eliot, the way he reacts when Quentin grinds down, the sound he makes when Quentin tangles his hands into Eliot’s hair—

“Wait, Q, I—” Eliot bites off on another groan and kisses him again, this time short and firm, and then he presses a hand to the center of Quentin’s chest, holding him at bay. “Let’s take—take—take a beat, here,” Eliot says, and it sounds like it’s hard for him to say.

“I don’t want to,” Quentin says, which is perfectly true. In this moment, he’s all id, all sensation. If he stops he’ll probably have to start thinking again, and what else is there to think about but _I’m in love with Eliot Waugh and he loves me back and oh my god we’re kissing right now_ —

“ _I_ need to take a beat, okay?” Eliot says, and that gets through better. Quentin pulls back, still touching, still close in the circle of Eliot’s arms, sitting back on his thighs so they’re not pressed so tightly together. “Q, baby.” ( _Baby._ Jesus, Q could die right now, die happy). “Q, I came over here planning to pulverize what was left of my heart, and I—I never _thought…_ ”

Quentin dives back in on instinct, squeezes him tight, so tight, head buried in Eliot’s neck. He’s not angling for another kiss, not looking to push again, he just—he wants to hold Eliot together, wants to erase all of the shit, all of the _pain_ he’s been in recently, because of Quentin. Because Quentin went over to his house and said _you’re in love with me_ instead of _I’m in love with you_. Because he’s very stupid. God. So stupid.

“El, tell me what you need,” he says. Anything he wants or needs, Q wants to give it to him. He wants to take care of him. He’s _eager_ for it, for the chance to prove himself worthy of some measure of Eliot’s feelings. “What can I do?”

Eliot kisses him on the forehead, and then takes a couple of deep breaths before pulling slightly back, his own brow creased. “What I want is—to stay here, and kiss you some more? But um. God, I’m sorry, but what I think I need is to go home. And. Take—”

“Take a beat,” Quentin says. He’s not going to pretend he likes the idea, but he gets it, honestly. He’s spent days waiting and waiting to talk to Eliot, so they could get _here_ to this moment, to this place where they’re two people who _love_ each other, where they can face the rest of the crap together. But Eliot didn’t have that. Eliot hasn’t been anticipating. He thought he was coming over here to cut ties, or at the very least to take Quentin’s hand and Alice’s hand and press them into each other, to be the instrument of his own devastation.

So now Eliot needs time to process, needs time to catch up to where _Quentin’s_ at. How the tables have turned. It’s almost funny. Maybe anything would be funny right now, the giddy thrumming through his veins making him understand the phrase _rose colored_ for the first time in his life. He wants to make out with Eliot right here on this couch for the rest of linear time, he really really does.

But he wants to give him what he needs, even more.

And so he slides off of Eliot’s lap and sits next to him on the couch again. Both of them are ignoring their erections, which is kind of hilarious, but Quentin manages to keep a straight face as he says— ”How long of a beat?”

Eliot just blinks at him. He looks kind of dazed, and Quentin feels a bit _smug_ about it, which is… new. Nice. “A day?” Quentin prompts, raising his eyebrows. “Can I see you tomorrow?” What he wants to ask is _can you just stay here tonight? I promise I won’t touch you if you don’t want me to, but god, can you just_ — _stay?_ But he doesn’t, because it wouldn’t be fair.

“Uh,” Eliot says. “Maybe two days? Is that… god, Q, is that okay?”

He looks genuinely anxious about Quentin’s response, and Quentin reaches his hands up to frame Eliot’s face, looking at him with as solemn an expression as he can manage when he’s so happy he can _feel_ the smile trying to sneak out. “It’s all okay, El. You and me, I think we’re going to be okay, now. Yeah?”

There’s going to be a lot of talking, Quentin knows that, but… but he also believes what he’s just said, and he hopes Eliot believes it too.

And so Eliot leaves, after kissing him once more, chaste, at the door.

Quentin waits ten minutes, and then texts him.

.....

_What does two days mean specifically?_

_48 hours? Or can i see you thursday earlier_

_Inquiring minds need to know when to  
start counting down the minutes._

_You’re going to be so much trouble, aren’t you?_

_Yes._

_Thank god._

_Also there’s another thing_ _inquiring minds would like to know…_

_I’m sure I’ll regret asking, but what would that be?_

_If we weren’t being responsible adults,  
what were you planning on doing to me?_

_That required taking a beat?_

_...You suck._

_Would be happy to._

_I’m on the subway, in public, you sadist._

_And i’m all alone in my apartment,  
with a big empty bed… hmm…_

_Two days means thursday morning._

_Come over as early as you want._

_Yes sir._

_And don’t call me sir unless you mean it._

_...Yes sir._

_I fucking hate you so much right now._

.....

Quentin sends back a heart emoji, his whole body shaking, vibrating with happiness, and then he texts Julia like fourteen exclamation points in a row, with no further context, and goes to sleep.

Tries to go to sleep.

He and Eliot keep texting until nearly one in the morning, and the fact that he’s lying in a bed he bought with Alice hardly even phases him. Which, he’s sure, will make him feel like garbage once again in the morning, but hey. Baby steps.

.....

_Margo’s doing a victory dance right now_

_She says you’re really stupid_

_I tried to defend your honor but  
she’s so much smarter than either of us._

_I am SO stupid_

_And i accept fair judgment from my  
lord and master Margo Hanson_

_Now don’t say THAT unless you really mean it_

_Margo steals my phone all the time_

_And she’s ten times kinkier than I am_

_Adding this to the list of topics to discuss_

_I hate you again._

_I love you_

_!!_

_Yeah me too whatever._

_I’m going to try and sleep now_

_Okay, goodnight._

_Quentin._

_I love you more than anything._

_Always have._

.....

Quentin sends another heart emoji. It’s about all he can manage, given the circumstances, but he’s pretty sure Eliot understands.


	5. Chapter Five

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This story has been, quite unexpectedly, one of the most rewarding things I’ve done in this fandom! It was meant to be a quick little distraction while working on my longer fic, but I’ve kind of fallen in love with the universe here. Thank you all so much for your incredibly kind words of encouragement, they really made my week.
> 
> Oh, and also? This story is set in the year 2020, but like… Covid-19 is not a thing here. Just in case anyone was distracted by the lack of social distancing on display.

Three months later, Quentin and Eliot go to Julia’s birthday party together, as a couple. And also with Margo, because _duh_. Technically it’s James’s birthday party too, since the two of them were born a day apart and they’ve been throwing a joint party for the past three years, ever since they got together, but April is always and forever going to be Jules’ birthday month, and James is just going to have to be cool with taking second place.

James has got plenty of his own friends there of course, and the party is actually at his parents’ house, which is kind of far away to travel for a party, but it’s _nice_ , and has a yard, and there are a lot of people there that actually turn out to be James’ parents’ friends and business associates. In other words, it’s a Real Party that Real Adults might go to. (Quentin is totally taking Jules out to a shitty bar with El and Margo sometime soon so they can also celebrate in the old way).

Also in attendance at the party? Alice, of course.

Julia had asked him about it, but the fact of the matter is, it would have been a real slap in the face not to invite Alice. Kady and Penny have been her main support system since the breakup, and they’re both going to be there. And Julia _likes_ Alice. They’re actually pretty good _friends_ , and while that friendship lasted as long as it did because of Quentin, it’s important that he remembers thatJulia actually knew her first.

So… Alice is there, Eliot’s there. Quentin’s seen Alice since the breakup, a number of times, really, but they’ve kept it fairly impersonal, figuring out who was going to stay in the apartment, if they should break the lease, should they sell the bed, or does one of them want to keep it? Is this your copy of _Catch-22_ or is it mine? That kind of thing. There have also been some general, vague “how are you”s and “I’m doing okay”s, but that… that’s just the part they’re both playing, the Mature Adults who are Handling This Well.

It’s different, knowing he’s going to see her in a social environment. And if he’s nervous about it, it’s nothing to _Eliot’s_ feelings.

“You’re overreacting,” Margo tells him, impatient.

“It’s going to be _fine_ ,” Quentin tries to reassure.

“I stole you,” Eliot says, looking down at him with a frown, eyebrows creased. “And you’re _you_ , and she doesn’t get to have you anymore. So. She must hate me.”

“Like Coldwater’s such a prize,” Margo scoffs, and then she rings the doorbell before Quentin can respond.

At first Quentin thinks they’re all just going to waltz around the issue. The gang of NYU alums find each other fairly quickly in the natural ebb and flow of the party, and they’re all polite, and they’re all… well, it’s odd, nobody’s saying anything, but the shifting of the bodies in the room are subtly adjusting themselves so that Eliot and Alice are never right next to each other, or directly across from one another, so it almost feels _normal_ that they haven’t said a word to each other… but Quentin feels a squirm of discomfort. It’s almost like the whole room is looking at the interplay between the person he thought he was going to marry and the person he’s _now_ planning on marrying someday (even if it’s way too soon to be saying that), although of course the whole room _isn’t_ looking at them, because most of the people here don’t know who the fuck they are, even.

Alice Quinn, though, is one of the bravest people Quentin has ever met. She’s not always kind, she’s not always great at empathy, but she’s seriously fucking brave, and she’s also a good person when it matters most.

So she steps up to Eliot at one point during the flow of conversation, and Quentin, Margo, Julia, Kady, and Penny all very carefully pretend not to be watching as Alice leans up towards Eliot, forcing Eliot’s taller frame to bend down, their faces close together.

Alice braces her hands on Eliot’s shoulders, and she goes up on her toes to whisper something in his ear, and Eliot—Eliot’s face does something that reminds Quentin vividly of how he’d looked when Quentin had said ‘you mean everything to me’ or ‘you’re the one who makes me happy’ or even the first “I love you’. He goes very still, and his mouth turns down into a frown of concentration, and he goes a little pale… and Alice keeps leaning up and into him until Eliot’s arms go around her, and then they’re just standing there hugging tightly, just off to the side of the group of friends they’d become adults alongside, and Quentin has to try very hard not to start crying at this sophisticated cool birthday party for Grown Ups.

It’s the moment when Quentin knows that he’s the luckiest person in the world, and that despite the self-loathing that still squirms around inside of him when he thinks about the mess he’s made of things, he’s really going to be okay. He’s going to be better than okay—he’s going to be happy, and so are the people he cares for most in the world. He’s going to be with Eliot, and one day they’re going to get married, and, well, the sky’s the fucking limit, they’ve never really talked about kids, but Quentin always pictured himself as a dad, and Eliot would be so _good_ at it, even though he won’t believe Q when he tells him that, and Alice is going to take over the fucking world if she wants to, as if Quentin’s ever had any reason to doubt that… everything is golden, and the party ends up being pretty damn fun after all. Eliot won’t tell him what Alice said, but Quentin really doesn’t feel like he needs to know.

But that Thursday in early February, two nights and literally hundreds of text messages since Eliot had come over with his heart in his hands and Quentin had surprised him by _not_ smashing it to smithereens, that future moment is still very far away. Quentin knows he loves Eliot, he knows Eliot loves _him_ , but he doesn’t know much more than that. He doesn’t know, for example, if when he knocks on Eliot’s door at 10AM (god, he could have been there at _six_ but he knows what Margo is like early in the morning and he doesn’t want to be murdered right when his life is about to start), he’s going to meet an Eliot who wants to kiss him until he can’t breathe, or an Eliot who wants to sit down and have a long, difficult conversation with him.

The reality is sort of… both, sort of neither.

When Eliot opens the door, he looks a little freaked out, like maybe he thought Quentin would have changed his mind since the last bout of texting that had happened literally while Quentin was on his way over. But when he looks at Quentin, whatever he sees in Quentin’s face seems to relax him, and he folds him into his arms, embracing him like they haven’t seen each other in two years, not two days (not _even_ two days, and it had felt like an eternity and oh god, maybe Quentin’s a _sap_ when he’s in love, and he just never knew before now).

“Hi,” Eliot says as he finally pulls back and steps aside to let Quentin into the apartment. “Um. Have you eaten? I made brunch.”

Margo’s standing against the kitchen counter, and Quentin feels a moment of genuine misapprehension because Margo loves him, but Eliot’s her _person_ , and Quentin has really, really fucked up in recent—and not-so-recent—years. But Margo merely stalks over to him, squints and lets her eyes rove around his face like she’s searching for something, and then she grins, punches him _really fucking hard_ on the arm, and pulls him into a quick hug, giving him a smacking kiss on the cheek as she does.

And then they sit down at the have a really fucking impressive brunch, and Quentin feels a little bit like Eliot is trying to _woo_ him, which, like, not necessary but kind of fucking hot, for some reason? And the day doesn’t stop there, it turns out that Eliot has this whole… _thing_ planned, that while Quentin had been pacing a hole in the carpet back home and probably pissing off the downstairs neighbors for the last thirty-six hours, Eliot has been putting together a low-intensity, quiet, yet still meticulously organized day of activities for the two of them.

Brunch with Margo, where they sit around and chat and drink mimosas and Eliot keeps looking at him like he’s afraid he’s going to disappear, but in a really _happy_ way, and then after that they go on a long, meandering walk, nearly making it all the way back to Quentin’s neighborhood and then winding their way back. Then Eliot takes him to the Brooklyn Museum, which… like… what? But it’s so much _fun_ , and Quentin knows very little about _most_ of the art despite the fact that he’d briefly considered an art history minor, and Eliot knows… well, maybe Quentin shouldn’t be surprised at the breadth and depth of Eliot Waugh’s knowledge, but even when neither of them knows shit about shit, it’s still just fun to look, and after stopping for coffee at a tiny little cafe near the museum, they end up back at Eliot’s, to find that Margo has left them to their own devices for the rest of the evening.

And throughout the day, they… talk. They talk like two people who know everything about each other, and also like two people who are getting to know one another in an entirely new context. After obsessing about it for a Quentin-Coldwater-ish length of time, Quentin gets up the courage to grab Eliot’s hand at some point during their walk, and he looks up in time to see Eliot’s expression of nearly disbelieving joy as their fingers tangle together. And then they spend practically the rest of the day like that, reconnecting quickly whenever they’re forced to let go for any reason, like they’re a couple of teenagers indulging in the giddy joy of new love.

It’s fun, and light, and even when they get back to El’s place and it stops being quite so light, it’s still comfortable. Still _them_. The sense of anticipation, the sense of—what now? what will this look like?—is all but gone by the time Eliot asks what Q wants for dinner and then bickers with him over who’s going to pay for takeout, a fight Quentin wins only after diligent struggle. They’re El and Q. They’re _them_ , the same as they’ve always been, they just… have some shit to work out, is all.

“I think we take this slow,” Eliot says over his carton of lo mein.

“I think ten years of knowing someone is um. Plenty of time to lay the groundwork, don’t you?” Quentin says back. He’s not surprised that Eliot’s taken this position, especially since he thinks he knows why.

“You and Alice…”

“We were never right for each other. Never,” Quentin says, firmly.

“That may be true,” Eliot says, with a concerned bunch to his forehead that makes Quentin want to reach out and smooth away the worry. “But seven years, Q, it’s a long time, and I don’t want you jumping into this right away and then—”

Quentin realizes, quite suddenly, that he _can_ lean over and press his thumb to the worry lines on Eliot’s brow, and so he does so, tracing his fingers down and cupping his hand around Eliot’s jaw. It shuts him up fast, but Quentin decides to seal the deal by saying: “I’m sure of you, El.”

“God, you’re like… _smooth_ , Coldwater, which I have to admit was not something I was prepared for, here.”

“I’ve got to bring my A-game, okay? You made me brunch, you took me on a _date_ , and, oh, yeah, I continuously and unknowingly made you miserable for the better part of a decade. Kinda feels like I owe you.”

Eliot pushes aside the remnants of his dinner and pins Quentin with a hard look. “That’s not true. I don’t… I don’t want you thinking being your friend was a _hardship_ or something, okay? If… fuck, if I’d loved you and you really didn’t love me back, that’s… something I could have handled with a bit more grace, but…”

“But that’s what you thought,” Quentin says. He stands up from the table and starts gathering together the leftovers to put in the fridge, and Eliot helps him, the dance as domestic and natural as if they do it every night. (Maybe now they will, maybe he gets to _have this_ ). “You thought it was all one-sided.”

“No, I…” Eliot pauses for long enough that Quentin thinks he’s changed his mind about talking, but then goes on. “I had to think that, because I couldn’t think anything else, Q, but if you’d really been… I mean if you’d _truly_ been indifferent to me in any way other than as a friend, I think I could have like… handled my shit.” He huffs out a laugh. “Like—not to downplay the, frankly, _terrifying_ amount of power you have over me? But if I’d been just sadly pining after my totally unsuspecting best friend who didn’t see me that way _at all_ , I’d like to think I’d have gotten over it before now.”

“So…”

Quentin doesn’t quite know what to make of that, but as they finish cleaning up and make their way over to the couch (the couch where they’d slept in each other’s arms for the first—second—time, the couch where mere weeks ago Quentin had told Eliot that he and Alice had broken up, had pinned the blame for that on Eliot in a weird, roundabout, unintentional, idiotic way), it hits him what Eliot is saying. That Eliot had been, all this time, picking up on the fact that Quentin wanted him too. That he’d seen it, sensed it, and tortured himself thinking he must be imagining it, because Quentin never said anything, never once, in all this time did anything to indicate…

Except he _had_ , that one night years ago, drunkenly, sloppily… and yet Eliot had kissed him first, that time. Eliot had started it, and Quentin had gotten together with Alice anyway.

He curls up, keeps himself close to Eliot, close enough to feel the warmth of his body, but not touching, at least not to start. This conversation is serious, and Quentin hasn’t abandoned potential plans of staying over tonight, but he’s willing to take Eliot seriously on the _going slow_ thing, if that’s what he needs.

Hesitantly, as if he’s afraid that even after a whole day of it Eliot will reject him now, Quentin reaches out for El’s hand. He holds it in both of his own, tracing over the lines of it with his fingers. As much time as he’s spent looking at Eliot’s face, he may have spent just as long studying these hands. Imagining how they’d feel, biting in to the skin of his waist, pinning him down against a flat surface, wrapped around—

“Tell me,” he says, to distract himself, to remind himself that he had his processing time, and Eliot’s still going through his. Alice is so far from his thoughts right now that he’s adding the fact to the list of reasons-to-feel-guilty-next-time-he’s-down, but if Eliot’s not in the same place mentally, then Quentin will respect that. “Tell me about it, about… like… the bullshit I put you through. If. If it’ll help to talk about it.”

Eliot glances up from the study he’s been making of Quentin holding his hand, and lifts an eyebrow at him sardonically, clearly in protest of Quentin orienting the blame on himself. But he doesn’t object, just squints an eye like he’s trying to figure out where to start.

“So. You came to see my show,” Eliot says, an unexpected beginning. “The first one I was in, that student production, freshman year, and it was _awful_ , and I’d told everyone about it but I’d…”

Quentin remembers. “You played it off like you knew it sucked and you’d be humiliated if anyone came and witnessed the trainwreck. But you were _so_ full of shit, you totally wanted people to see you.”

“You were the only fucking person who understood that,” Eliot says. “You scared me so fucking bad, it was like you were reading my mind, like you _knew_ me, and nothing’s ever been more terrifying to me than that.”

“Margo was there too.”

“Margo and I had a pact to support each other’s bullshit. You were just—my quiet little nerd friend. You were someone I could pass off as a casual acquaintance if I decided to pull the plug on getting too close. And then you came, and you sat in the second row, and afterwards you had _specific compliments_ about the parts you really enjoyed, about my performance, and the show was garbage, but you didn’t lie about anything, you were being honest about the shit that worked, without being a dick about the rest of it.”

“El, come on,” Quentin says. He’d been a dick in undergrad. A pretentious dick, and they both know it. It’s something he’s still trying to consciously avoid, even years later.

“I’m serious,” Eliot continues. “You didn’t bullshit me, you didn’t say it was the best thing you’d ever seen. You said you liked the part where I was standing in the background watching other people talk, because you could see from the way I was holding myself and the way my eyes moved how my character felt about it, even before I said anything. You’d been watching _me_ , in the background, instead of the fucking conversation between the leads.”

Quentin had always stared at Eliot back then. Always stares at him now. Kind of impossible not to. That’s the kind of thing it would probably be okay to say, now, wouldn’t it? Before he can decide to do so, Eliot continues.

“And I went from mildly infatuated to… to more than mildly infatuated, pretty much right away. But it wasn’t just that, it was… at the cast party, do you remember?”

The answer is, not really. Quentin isn’t a huge partier, but when he’s at a party, he gets nervous enough to drink way too much, and then subsequently forgets if he managed to have a good time, or totally embarrass himself, or maybe both.

“No,” Quentin says. “Oh god, what did I say?”

“Nothing much,” Eliot says, smiling with one hundred watt affection. “You were a bit of a wallflower. But I brought you a drink, and came to stand by you, because there was nobody at that party I wanted to talk to more.”

Per the new mantra running around in his head twenty-four seven, Quentin may just be the world’s biggest idiot. “Yeah?”

“Always,” Eliot promises, solemn. “And you accepted the drink, and you went to take a gulp of it, you know, to fortify yourself for being at this rambunctious gathering you’d only even come to because I’d asked and Margo had ordered. And then you paused, before drinking, and you held your cup up to me and said ‘to you, El. You were really amazing tonight.’”

Quentin feels himself blush to the top of his forehead. That does sound like something he would have said back then, hopelessly earnest, unbearably sincere.

“And it was…” Eliot says, swallowing hard. “People compliment me all the time? At that party, I’d already been offered like six different blowjobs.”

Quentin snorts out a laugh, leaning into Eliot’s arms. He’d always been so jealous back then, of Eliot, for having all these people throw themselves at him. (Or maybe he’d been jealous of the people Eliot had accepted. Of course he had been. Of course). But now, it didn’t seem so enraging. It was funny. Sweet, even, that Eliot had foregone said blowjobs to come hang out with his hopelessly awkward friend in the corner. The one who probably would have dropped to his knees if he’d been asked, but never, _ever_ would have thought to make the offer.

“Show off,” Quentin says, quiet, at a loss.

“Yeah. Well. The point was, people had spent the whole night congratulating me and telling me I looked hot and that I’d done well, and it was all such bullshit, but it was what people _said_ , what was expected. The theatre runs off insincere, effusive praise. But when _you_ said it? I believed it. I believed it, and _fuck_ , being complimented by you was a better natural high than I’d ever received from any substance in my life.”

“Eliot.”

“I loved you then. From that day forward. I loved you so much, I made myself sick over it.”

It’s too much. Quentin’s throat feels like it’s on fire. If he could get his body to cooperate, if he could get himself to just _focus_ , for half a second, he’d find out that he’s happy, but it hurts too much, right now it _hurts_ too much, thinking of all the years, the moments when Eliot looked at him and _loved_ him, loved him so much he was in pain, and Quentin just took-took-took from him and never gave anything back, and—

“You’re impossible,” Quentin says, choked up, drowning, heart beating outside his body. “I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Stop,” Eliot says, _tsking_ and taking his free hand up, to curl it around the back of Quentin’s neck. “This isn’t all on you. I didn’t say anything. Ever. If I had…”

If he had, would Quentin be one of those people who met the love of his life at eighteen, who dated the same person for literally the entirety of his adulthood, so sure of his choice that his youth offered no deterrent to the strength of his devotion?

God, he’d like to think so, but as much as Quentin can still be a mess now, today, he knows how much work he’d still had to do back then. And El, god, El was straight from his escape from Indiana, drinking and partying way too much and just laying the groundwork in the creation of himself as something else, something different, refining his personality with intentionality and grace that Quentin had always admired since he couldn’t help but be so staunchly, immovably _himself_ no matter how hard he tried, but now he looks back and he sees the scars underneath the stage makeup, metaphorically speaking, and if _that_ El and _that_ Quentin had tried something…

Well, he’ll never know. They might have beaten the odds. With how much love he feels for Eliot here and now, he likes to imagine that they would have.

“If you had,” Quentin says, because the past doesn’t matter, and they have this, right now, “I’d have jumped you so fucking fast.”

“Oh yeah?” Eliot says, and he has his _come at me, Coldwater_ face on, the one Quentin can now interpret as an invitation, a real one, against all fucking odds…

And so Quentin dips up to kiss him again. He means it to be a sweet thing, chaste, because he heard what Eliot said about going slow and he’s being good, he really is, but it’s Eliot who opens to him immediately, intensifies the kiss, pressing him forward, crowding him back against the couch. Maybe, despite El’s protestations, he’s hitting a bit of a wall with the mature, logical talking thing. It’s always been highly overrated, as far as Quentin is concerned, so he’s not going to complain about this turn of events.

Eliot is _definitely_ the one who pulls Quentin into his lap this time, and if this is going to be a _thing_ , Quentin is not at all complaining about it. It’s so good, kissing Eliot, is the thing, because he’s not hiding anything about how it feels, and neither is Quentin, they’re both just—expressive and effusive and it’s important that Eliot knows how much Quentin loves this, loves touching him, because more than wanting to feel good, he wants to make Eliot feel good, wants to make him _happy_.

“You’re insatiable,” Eliot says, as if he’s not the one whose hands have crept under Quentin’s t-shirt, as if he’s not the one biting on Quentin’s lower lip and licking into his mouth when Quentin moans at the small nip of pain. And it just goes from there, and Quentin is incandescent with the relief of not talking, because talking is overrated, talking is the shit you have to get through to get to _this_ , isn’t it? “ _So_ much trouble,” Eliot continues, both of his hands on Quentin’s hips, pulling him down to grind against Eliot directly.

“ _Me_?” Quentin laughs, and the sound is too loud, bright and effervescent, and he suddenly has a flash of an image, like a memory but in the wrong order: what if Margo comes home, and sees them grinding against each other fully clothed in the living room? Because that’s what they’re doing, their hips twitching and rolling and rutting, both of them breathing so loudly that it’s gone way past the point of attractive, pornographic sex-sounds, and into the realm of true desperation, but neither of them are stopping, and Eliot’s got his teeth clamped onto Quentin’s earlobe now, and _fuck_ — _fuck_ —

“El, I love you, I love you more than anything, I’m fucking _obsessed_ with you, I can’t—” Quentin gasps out, and then he goes back to it, he dips his tongue back into the warmth of Eliot’s mouth—

“Motherfucker,” Eliot gasps, like he’s in pain, and he wrenches his mouth away from Quentin’s, his eyes are rolling back in his head. “Q, you’re gonna make me come if you fucking say that.”

“Really? This?” Quentin giggles, overjoyed. “I _love_ you, Eliot. I love you. I love you.”

“Okay but this is not taking things slow, though?” Eliot manages to gasp out, even though his hips are still moving and his eyes are still wide, the pupils blown out to black.

“But I kinda want to suck you off. Is that something that fits into… I mean, can I?”

Eliot freezes under him, a look of pure desperation crossing his face, and it would have been funny if Quentin hadn’t been just as keyed up, just as shaky for something, for the feel of El against his tongue, in his mouth, How many times has he imagined it? Craved it?

“No,” Eliot manages, throwing his head back against the couch. “We—we can’t, not now.”

“Are you serious?” Quentin gasps, disbelieving. “You just told me you _loved_ me literally pretty much the _whole time_ we’ve known each other, and you’re not going to let me suck your dick?”

Eliot laughs, and it sounds a little bit hysterical. He shifts away from Quentin, just slightly, and Q almost can’t handle that. He’s desperate for the contact, feels like he’s drowning without it.

“Q, we’re having a conversation. And I’m not fucking around about going slow, here.”

“Evidently not,” Quentin says, and he’s going for sarcastic-not-snappy, trying not to veer off into actual frustration, because if El doesn’t want this, of course they’ll stop, but god, El _does_ want this, it’s not just the obvious thing, the part Quentin can _feel_ pressing into his stomach, it’s the look on Eliot’s face, like he’s a starving man at a feast, but—but _fine_ , whatever, he’ll—

He clambers off of Eliot’s lap, like an echo of a few days before, feeling stymied, shaky, wanting.

“God,” Eliot says. “You’re—really fucking gorgeous right now.”

“You want me to get this whole situation under control, please don’t say things like that,” Quentin says, waving a hand over the erection straining against the front of his jeans as he gasps for breath, trying to regulate his heart rate and his breathing and the shaking, tingling pins of want still cascading up and down his extremities.

“Here I was thinking I’d have to coax you out of some repressed shell,” Eliot says, and there’s a strain to his own voice too, but he’s very carefully not touching Quentin now, both of them sitting on the couch and staring up at the ceiling. “That may just be my completely disrespectful virgin kink, though.”

“You’re the fucking worst,” Quentin says without missing a beat, because even though up until a few days ago they were totally platonic friends and nothing more, scout’s honor, Quentin already knew about Eliot’s deflowering fantasies, because, ha-ha-get-this, they were the kinds of friends who just _talked_ about that kind of stuff, and it isn’t weird, no really it isn’t, El and Margo talk about sex all the time too, and it’s not like _they_ —but of course they have, haven’t they, not infrequently if Margo is to be believed, and—okay, another question to ask, another topic to consider. Quentin’s not sure he’s up for it tonight.

“Mostly,” Eliot says, much softer now, “back then, even when I dreamed about—even when I hoped that _maybe_ … I always pictured it as some clandestine thing, like, I’d be your dirty little secret. Fucking—Sebastian Flyte-subtext-style, and then you’d marry, I don’t know, someone else, and I’d slink off to the continent and pretend I wasn’t sad about it.”

“Can you call Europe ‘the continent’ if you’re American?” Quentin asks, in some instinctive attempt to shy away from remembering how _Brideshead Revisited_ ends.

“I’m American only in the factual sense,” Eliot retorts, and then continues on with his train of thought. “I guess when I entertained fantasies back then of you wanting me back, it was never the happy homo couple kind of fantasy, it was always… I guess a part of me always thought you were a little embarrassed by me.”

“No,” Quentin says, immediately, viscerally. The idea that Eliot ever could have thought that, that a part of him might _still_ be thinking it— “God, El. No. I’m not going to pretend that things were… simple for either of us back then, I’m not trying to erase the degree to which we were both fucking disasters but I was _never_ embarrassed by you. I was so… proud, to be your friend, proud that you wanted me around, and the thought of you thinking that I was ashamed or whatever, for even one second, god, it breaks my heart, it—”

“Okay,” Eliot says, cutting him off with equal parts amusement and pleasure. “I get it, I get it.”

“Do you?” Quentin says. God, it’s so important. “If I was embarrassed by anything it was my obnoxious crush on you.”

“Sometimes I thought I was going crazy,” Eliot says, soft, like a confession. “You looked at me like you wanted to _climb_ me sometimes, but I kind of thought you weren’t… aware of it? Like maybe you’d repressed the fact you were attracted to me because you didn’t want to be attracted to me.”

Quentin has the instinct to respond immediately, to push back against that characterization and reassure Eliot that wanting him was never, ever the problem. It couldn’t be.

“It wasn’t that,” Quentin says slowly, finally, when he thinks he has a reasonable grasp on the truth inside of himself. “I was in denial. I thought it was something—I never wanted to look too closely at how I felt, but it wasn’t because I didn’t want to be attracted to you. That ship sailed literally minute one, okay?”

Eliot smiles at that, ego effectively stroked, but he doesn’t say anything, just wants for Quentin to continue. He knows when Q’s pauses mean he’s done talking, and when they mean he’s fortifying himself for more. Most people don’t have the patience to sit through the pauses. Not even Julia, usually. Definitely not—but he’s not thinking about Alice.

He clears his throat, and blinks up at Eliot, giving him his full attention. “I never once really processed the fact that you… that I was that important to you, because I didn’t see how someone like you could…” he bites the inside of his cheek, frustrated, searching for better words. “I think I saw you as… you’re the kind of person where—sex is casual. Sex is temporary. Relationships are temporary. Everything you like, everything you are, it’s all just a state of being for as long as you feel like keeping it that way, and then you just slip out of it like changing your clothes, and you walk away without looking back.”

“That’s not who I am,” Eliot says at once, like he can’t help just this one contradiction, here in the middle of things.

“I know,” Quentin says. “I’ve always known that was bullshit, it’s just—the things you chose to keep, those things felt so rare, and special, and somehow I was one of them, and yet I had this idea that if I pushed you too hard you’d remember you could walk away, and I didn’t want that. Couldn’t handle it.”

“But I couldn’t walk away,” Eliot insists. “You’re the one thing I could never walk away from. It’s been excruciating. Infuriating. From the start.”

“I wish you’d said something,” Quentin says, and then he looks up and sees Eliot’s raised eyebrow, the unimpressed twitch of his mouth. “Sorry, that’s—not fair, I guess I just mean I wish we’d both said something, I wish we’d… that I’d known and that you’d known and that I could have come to every one of your shows and then kissed you afterwards, when you came out with your costume still on. I thought about that a lot.”

“You came to every one of my shows,” Eliot says, dreamy, like the significance of this is only now occurring.

“But I didn’t kiss you,” Quentin says.

“You can kiss me now,” Eliot informs him, magnanimous.

“Oh, thank you,” Quentin says. He means it to be sarcastic again, but he’s not sure if he pulls it off. And he does. Kiss him, that is. He kisses him quite thoroughly. They do a lot of that for the rest of the evening, tamping on the breaks whenever they start to veer from a heavy make-out into straight-up groping. Kind of torture, really, but also kind of fun, the anticipation, the building low in Quentin’s gut, the _knowing_ that he’ll get that outlet before too long, and that it’s going to be incendiary when it happens.

And better than all of that is the fact that Eliot invites Q to stay the night. They crawl into bed together, and Quentin would have expected another torturous session of lips and tongues and hands with no real build to it, would have thought being alone, on a bed, in the dark, with the man of his dreams, would have meant sleepless hours of ratcheting tension as they both wavered on their conviction (Eliot’s fucking conviction) that waiting is the best idea here. Instead, the minute Quentin is horizontal, he’s on the point of unconsciousness, the emotional toll of the day(s) catching up with him.

“Margo?” he mumbles as they settle down side by side. “Is she—”

“She’ll stay away,” Eliot says. “Crash somewhere else. But in case she doesn’t,” Eliot says, and Quentin can see his smile, even in the dark, “you’ll have to scoot over, get a little closer to make room.”

“Well, gosh, I might as well do that now,” Quentin says, and that night he gets to fall asleep curled into Eliot, head pillowed on his chest, heart full and brain mercifully quiet.

***

“Hey so, um. Another thing?” Eliot says in the morning, while they sit at the tiny kitchen table and drink coffee together, “I might freak out.”

“Yeah?” Quentin says, looking up from the email he was reading on his phone. “About something in particular? Climate change? The economy?”

“You’re not funny and I don’t love you anymore,” Eliot says, blank-faced, voice a low monotone. Quentin’s heart does something acrobatic, elated, and he sees the rest of his life stretching in front of him. It’s not the first time, not at all, but this is the first time he’s been fully happy about his prospects, and isn’t _that_ something to file away, to tell his therapist the next time he goes in.

“I’m fucking hilarious, and also a catch,” he says, managing an eyeroll instead of soppy adoration.

Eliot smiles then, and he leans forward and pushes a strand of Quentin’s hair behind his ear, keeps the pads of his fingers there, brushing softly against the skin of Quentin’s face. “Goddamn, you’re pretty when you’ve gotten a good night’s sleep.”

“As opposed to when I don’t?”

Eliot’s expression is deadly sincere, and too solemn for the mood Quentin had been trying to set. “I really love you,” he says, almost apologetic. “I’m not good at this, though. I’m not. I haven’t had a lot of practice.”

“At loving someone?” Quentin asks. _Eliot really loves me_ , he thinks. His whole body is singing with it. His blood is racing, his hands are trembling. This man. _This man_ , the best person I know, _really loves me_. Eliot doesn’t look to me in a celebratory mood, though, so Quentin tries to school his face into something appropriately serious.

“At letting someone,” Eliot says, very quietly, a trembling, terrified whisper, “at letting someone love me. And at… at loving someone. Um. Properly. Without hiding or running or deciding it’s not worth the risk. And if I fuck this up with you I honestly don’t know if that’s going to be survivable for me so I’m telling you right now, when I’m still feeling brave because I’m like—so happy I feel high, not to let me get away with any of my bullshit. Promise me.”

Quentin stares at him. Blinks. Swallows. “Are you sure you won’t let me have sex with you right now?”

Eliot laughs, an only half-way humorous sound. “I’m sure that I want to do this right.”

“El…”

“Seven years is a long time, Q,” Eliot whispers, repeating his argument. “And maybe you’re right, and you and Alice were always wrong for each other, but that doesn’t mean you don’t love her.”

“Not like I love you,” Quentin says, ignoring the guilt. Alice isn’t here. He’s not going to lie to himself, or to Eliot, not to spare her feelings.

When he next talks to her, which will happen sooner rather than later, because the emotional closure has happened but they still _signed a lease together_ and told all of their friends and family they were engaged, have operated through the years as a couple in so many tiny ways, so there will definitely still be some talking… he’ll be kind. He won’t say _thank you for telling me about Eliot, because now I understand what happiness and love are supposed to feel like in the context of a relationship, and we never had that, and now I’m going to have it with_ him _, so, anyway, bye_.

Here, now, in Eliot’s apartment? He doesn’t have to tip-toe around the Alice issue. He can pour himself into this, into this thing with Eliot, even if it is too fast. Or too disrespectful. Whatever. He trusts Eliot not to judge him for it, and isn’t that a wild idea?

Eliot closes his eyes, like something Quentin has said has pained him. “My resolve is like—paper thin on the sex thing, Q. So maybe don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Declare your love for me?” Eliot says, voice going higher than usual. “All—handsome and boyfriend-y, wearing my shirt, drinking the coffee I made you? Very distracting, very uncool.”

“You seemed to really enjoy it yesterday,” Quentin says, because he’s feeling evil, and he’s feeling _happy_ , and he knows things are complicated, and that the twisty parts of this whole situation are going to keep swallowing him up at the most unexpected moments, but for now he wants to chase the happy, wants to bask in being called _handsome_ by the most insanely gorgeous person he’s ever seen in real life.

Eliot kisses him, maybe to shut him up, and for a while they go at it against the kitchen counter, Quentin trying to climb Eliot, to get his legs around Eliot’s waist, while Eliot tries valiantly, and with increasingly crumbling resolve, not to flip them around and prop Quentin up on the counter for better leverage. It’s heady, the power he has over Eliot. He can tug on Eliot’s hair and it makes him shudder. He can dip his tongue into Eliot’s mouth and it makes him melt.

Margo interrupts them by coming in through the front door with a walk of never-felt-shame-in-my-life-thank-you- _very_ -much, so Eliot doesn’t have to stop Quentin, _again_ , from being way too horny in the middle of the day, and then Quentin… god, Quentin goes home to change and then to work, to face the fucking music from all the time he’s been missing lately. Which is distinctly torturous, but made less so by the fact that Eliot keeps texting him throughout the day, and by the fact that he’s going to see him again when he manages to temporarily escape the corporate machine. Who knew that having a relationship you’re excited about could make the drudgery of a workday go faster?

***

They make it approximately three weeks before they have sex for the first time, and that’s only because they do a lot of heavy, deeply unsexy talking about their trauma and their pasts and all the ways Quentin has fucked up, and it’s a distraction from how badly Quentin wants to jump Eliot’s bones, and how much Eliot clearly wants to let him.

Margo’s on Quentin’s side, surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly. She’s deeply on board the “sex makes everything better” train, and informs them both grumpily that she can practically _smell_ the unresolved sexual tension in the air, and that if they’re going to be all gooey with each other anyway, why the fuck deny themselves the good parts?

It’s funny to find himself aligned with Margo in this mindset, with Eliot, of all people, on the other side, although when he’d expressed as much to his _new boyfriend_ , Eliot had seemed slightly affronted.

“I’m being a responsible fucking adult about this,” he says.

“But like, just for the sake of argument,” Quentin says, and Eliot’s rolling his eyes before the words are even out, “if we know we’re _going_ to have sex at some point, and both of us are absolutely sure we’re not going to change our minds, then—”

Eliot’s knockout comeback, though, is one Quentin can’t totally argue with: “I don’t want us getting together to be _entirely_ about your breakup with Alice, and even if _you_ don’t see it that way… she’s kind of still on my mind a lot, alright?”

So they wait, and when Eliot finally breaks it’s in the middle of a perfectly ordinary dinner at home (Eliot’s home, not Quentin’s, not officially, although he hasn’t been staying at his and Alice’s apartment, too weird, and he’s going to be moving soon anyway). Margo’s there, they’re just talking about something stupid, recounting a story from school, and Quentin isn’t even really aware of Eliot looking at him, probably because Eliot always looks at him a lot, even though on his worst days Quentin has no fucking clue why that would be—

“Okay,” Eliot says, cutting Quentin off mid-sentence. “Okay, fine, come on.”

“What?” Quentin says, blinking and trying to orient his brain to whatever strange wave-length Eliot’s suddenly on.

Margo seems to know somehow, before Quentin does, because she turns to Eliot with pouty lips and fluttering eyes. “I don’t suppose you’d let me watch?”

“Get the fuck out, Bambi,” Eliot says, and Quentin’s heart leaps up into his throat as he realizes that Eliot is standing, and holding out a hand for him. “Q, come to bed with me.”

“Oh, Jesus, finally,” Quentin says, and he ignores Margo’s peeling laughter as the two of them race for the bedroom.

He’s had so many fantasies about this, and most of them involve Eliot pinning him down and driving him wild, so it kind of takes Quentin by surprise when he finds himself pushing Eliot backwards, making him sit on the bed, and dropping to his knees between the vee of his thighs. Not the part where he wants to suck Eliot’s dick so bad he’s practically drooling, that part isn’t surprising at all, it’s more the part where Eliot isn’t the one directing things.

“Holy shit,” is all Eliot says, actually, as Quentin nuzzles forward, as he bats Eliot’s hands out of the way and undoes his belt buckle, as he gestures for Eliot to tilt his hips up so he can slip his trousers down far enough, and as he pops the half-hard head of Eliot’s cock into his mouth. “Holy shit. Holy _shit_ …”

“This okay?” Quentin asks, lifting off for a moment, looking up at Eliot’s flabbergasted expression. “I really want you to fuck me, El, but honestly I don’t know if I’m patient enough for that right now.”

“I fucking made you up,” Eliot groans, reaching down and thumbing at Quentin’s lip, his eyes going dark as Quentin’s mouth drops open, licking at the pad of his finger. “You’re the most dangerous person I’ve ever met.”

“That’s a yes?”

“You want this?” Eliot says, as if he thinks Quentin might change his mind _now_ of all times.

Quentin nods. “Please.”

Evidently, Quentin on his knees, asking for it, is a _thing_ for Eliot. Quentin looking up at him from the floor, Quentin’s mouth, Quentin’s sloppy, not-exactly-an-expert-at-this blowjob, Quentin getting so turned on he has to reach down and grind his palm against his own cock through his pants midway through, just to ease some of the pressure. All of these are _things_ for Eliot, if the gasping sound of his breath, if the pleading whine in his voice as he says Quentin’s name over and over and _over_ again are anything to go by.

“Fuck, I wanna fuck you, I want—Q, baby, is that—do you really want—” he seems to be struggling not to thrust up into Quentin’s mouth, and while Quentin knows, objectively, that it’s probably not a pleasant experience to actually, literally, choke on a dick, he kind of wants to try it, wants Eliot to be rough, take what he needs. Of course, if Eliot _fucks_ him, then he could—they could—

Quentin moans around Eliot’s cock and then slips off, breathing deep. Eliot makes a panicked sound and his hips twitch forward, seeking, but Quentin holds firm to his convictions for just long enough to say— “Yes, yes, fuck me, will you? Will you fuck me—”

And then Eliot’s pulling him up, pinning him to the bed, kissing the air out of Quentin’s lungs, touching him everywhere. The fantasy Quentin’s had in his head continues apace, only it’s like going from black and white to color, everything vivid, everything _real_ , no way to attribute this to the haziness of daydream. Eliot’s hands, big and yet oddly delicate. Eliot’s chest hair, the scratch of it against Quentin’s cheek. Eliot’s _thighs_ , pinning Quentin down on the bed as he somehow performs the alchemy of undressing them both without having to separate entirely to do so. E-l-i-o-t-’s-f-i-n-g-e-r-s stretching him open, _fuck_ , it’s been—a while—but El’s so good, so careful, more careful than Quentin wants him to be, as worked up as he is. He doesn’t want to come before Eliot gets inside, despite Eliot’s suggestion that he’ll feel more relaxed if he’s already—but Quentin wants— _together_ , with the feel of Eliot fucking into him, and Eliot groans loud at that, wanting what Quentin wants, wanting to _give_ him that.

They start face-to-face, missionary, and stare into each other’s eyes like a pair of love-sick goons, like the only two people left in the center of a shared universe. It lasts longer than it has any right to, but they both want to make this one good; Quentin can practically hear Eliot thinking about hasty handjobs in a college kids’ bedroom, and he’s thinking about the same thing, about how _this_ is not _that_ , about how that had felt like an ending, this a beginning. And about how at the same time, this is the culmination of something they’d started back then, something they’d left unfinished until now.

Eventually Eliot pulls out only long enough to rearrange them, to lay on his side and pull Quentin back into his arms, back-to-chest, sliding in and going deeper in the new position, and at that point Quentin knows it can’t last much longer for either of them, the slow roll of Eliot’s hips escalating until Quentin can hear the slap of skin between them, asynchronistic to the panting of their breaths.

“I’m gonna be so good to you, Q,” Eliot groans, lips grazing the shell of his ear. “Every day. Let me—let me—”

He sounds like he’s begging, like he, _Eliot_ , is the one in any position to beg, when he’s got an arm around Quentin’s chest like an iron band, the other gripped bruise-tight on his hip as he slams into him.

“El,” he says, brilliant contribution, but it’s all he’s got, it’s all he can _think_ , just _El El El_ over and over again, bright sparks imploding in front of his eyes, and when he comes, it’s like he’s relaxing, fully, for the first time maybe in his life. Oh _this_ , is what he thinks, _this_ is being safe, _this_ is being loved.

Eliot doesn’t last much longer, he starts to pull out when his thrusts lose their rhythm but Quentin makes a wordless plea, not sure why he wants it or what he’s even asking for, but he throws a hand back and grabs Eliot, holds him in, holds him still. “ _Stay_ ,” he manages, his throat spasming around the simple word.

Eliot groans, sucks a bruise into Quentin’s neck, and comes, deep inside, and Quentin can feel it, feel him, love him, feel Eliot loving him right the fuck back and it’s…

Yeah, it’s fucking perfect, okay? It’s perfect, and he thinks of nothing but himself, and Eliot, and the thing they’re starting together; there’s nothing left in the whole wide world but this.

But for some reason, after they’ve cleaned up and Eliot’s holding him, warm and sated in the bed, the first thing he says is, “I’m totally going to quit my job, El.”

Eliot nods his head against Quentin’s, nuzzling in, relaxed as if he’d already known that was going to happen. “I guess I’ll have to abandon my dream of being a kept man, and actually start making money.”

“Hmm, sorry to disappoint,” Quentin says, totally relaxed, totally unworried. He went to school for a fucking long time and spent a fuck of a lot of money to get where he is now, but he hates being a lawyer, and he’s absolutely done lying to himself about that, about what he wants and who he is. He’ll figure out what’s next, and Eliot will hold his hand while he does so. “Last chance to back out, just in case you were only after me for my money.”

Eliot pulls in a breath like he’s going to make a joke, continue the bit, the spark of fire always zipping and pinging between them, the same flame they’ve noticed and tried to ignore for so long, the flame they’ve decided to tend, nurture, grow into a proper torch, one they can hold together. But instead, Eliot’s arms constrict, holding him just that tiniest bit closer, and he says— “No, I think I’m good where I am, thanks.”

He is, Quentin realizes. They both are. They’re good where they are; right here right now is good enough for forever, but it won’t be forever. Because shit changes, people switch careers, they move, they drift apart and back together and some shit isn’t salvageable, but sometimes if you’re tenacious enough and if you have an ex-girlfriend smart and selfless and brave enough to pull the plug and course-correct and send you into someone else’s waiting arms, you _can_ salvage the shit that matters. So Eliot’s good where he is, and so is Quentin, and when they go to wherever they’re going next, they’ll do that together too.

**Author's Note:**

> Come say hi on tumblr @Nellie-Elizabeth!


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